[tharkun__]

Yes they did. My dad worked in IBM 360 assembler. And in COBOL. And in Natural (yes that's actually a programming language - https://documentation.softwareag.com/natural/nat426mf/pg/pg-...) And JCL. And I am probably forgetting some. And they had learn their "Hibernate" and JPA etc too (CICS comes to mind).

Also in a similar regard your article mentions other things like microservices being the root of all evil so to speak and you need to know multiple services.

When in fact microservices are meant to do the opposite. You are supposed to be able to focus on just your service and what it needs to do and make it do it well. Instead of having to wade through a huge monolithic and probably very interwoven code base. We can of course talk about whether microservices achieved that goal.

They are not fundamentally different from having worked in large enterprises 25 years ago where you would've encountered many many different services making up your application landscape. It was probably using SOA and the services were deployed to a bunch of application servers like an IBM WebSphere and those services might be talking to other services incidentally deployed on some JBoss app servers and they'd talk via message passing via a queue (JMS comes to mind but other ways existed).

[rmanolis]

Did your Dad worked on IBM 360 assembler, COBOL, Natural and JCL on the same day?

today fullstack developers have to pivot between 2-3 languages on the same day

All the SOA back then was JAVA, they had just different types of HTTP servers to run JAVA

[tharkun__]

All four probably not. He might have worked on some feature in COBOL that then required a new/change to a channel program that would have been written in assembler and at the end of the day write some JCL to get a job to start. Yes.

I constantly write software in Typescript, Java and Kotlin. Some days it's all of them other days it's only a subset. I don't see an issue with that at all. If you don't have a standard set of languages I would agree with you but a stack of one frontend and one backend language should not be a problem for anyone that calls themselves full stack.

The SOA point was not about languages any longer. It was about having multiple services that make up an overall feature and app landscape. Also you seem to have missed the part where I said that I was not in fact HTTP calls is manyif not most cases ;)

[rmanolis]

And how is your social life? Do you have a girlfriend?

[tharkun__]

Completely fine and the kids are growing (up fast).

I fail to see how one has anything to do with the other.

Knowing and applying both Java and Typescript is not an issue at all. What is a pain is CSS and why I tell everyone I'm a BE dev. But I happily build vertical slices of functionality where I have full control over FE and BE code and can adjust as I see fit instead of having to create or follow a rigid interface definition and where the BE isn't user testable when it gets written. What is a pain is the libraries on the FE but that's not an issue with knowing multiple programming languages but with the web dev FE ecosystem in general. A non full stack FE developer would have the same pain.

While we did learn a programming language at university to code our exercises in, we didn't learn that language specifically as "this is the language we teach and this is what you will use in your job until you retire". On the contrary we were told and taught about programming concepts, data structures and algorithms and it was expected that you can program in any language. The (mandatory) operating systems course for example would just assume that you learned enough C by yourself to do the programming exercises. We had to write a working memory compactification algorithm for Minix. In the scripting language course (non mandatory) you had to choose any scripting language you wanted and implement a project in it. In the mandatory hardware course we were expected to pick up enough VHDL to implement whatever we learned in the course.

[rmanolis]

So you telling me that you don't need to study on your free time? Is that correct?

You can't program in any language, don't fool yourself. Take, for example, SQL that is used in all companies. Can you write SQL functions with the same ease as Java? You may ask why do you need functions in SQL? Because it is faster to run the algorithm in SQL, rather than in Java from an ORM.

[tharkun__]

I do not study in my free time, no.

I'm not saying I can instantly program at expert level in any language I've never heard of. But yes, I can read most programming languages even without ever having seen them. Take LUA. I had never used LUA and when I started out I was reading code examples and writing LUA code without first "learning" it at all. I just went and did it. Did I probably do some "stupid things" that an expert would do differently and/or fast? Of course. But I got stuff done and learned as I went along. Same when we introduced Kotlin for example. I was instantly productive but someone using Kotlin for a longer time (such as today's me) would "cringe" at how I was writing Kotlin as if it was Java.

Notable exceptions would be languages that have such a weird syntax as Brainfuck ;)

SQL is a great example. I have not been using SQL directly for quite a long time now. But about 20 years ago my bread and butter was SQL and I was writing stored procedures every single working day and I was not writing any Java at that point in time but was using two other languages other than SQL on a daily basis as well (Perl and Bash).