[petermurrayrust]

I've been through 50 years of "programming" with a major change each decade. The key thing is to be in the company of young people.

It's harder to learn new things because you have to unlearn earlier ones. My Java started by looking like FORTRAN, my Python now looks like Java.

It's critically important to use good Open tools. Eclipse is wonderful. I could not work without JUnit and whenever I run into problems I use the discipline of using tests to define the problem. I have learnt to "love" Maven as I can't do without it. I could not live without Jenkins/Continuous Integration.

The main problem is that all these add up, both in learning, installation and support. When I "retired" my website in cambridge gradually decayed and an upgrade to the OS meant Jenkins no longer worked. It's now back (thanks, Mark Williamson) and has restored impetus in the chemistry coding.

You have to include time for exploration ("dead ends"). I jumped into javascript when it first appeared - it wasted huge amounts of time as every browsers "upgrade" was a disaster. I started Python and that was nearly as bad. Now , 10+ years on, they're robust and I shall relearn them. Probably be working alongside experts in a hackathon.

I believe in code review and am happy for others to review mine!

[dvirsky]

I find it that HackerNews itself, while it does waste a lot of my time reading and toying with such "dead ends", keeps me on the edge of things. I've started using Go because of posts and discussions here, and it's changed the way I do my work in the past year.