Experience counts in coding

Life is change. I'm not sure if that's a quote, or something I just made up. However, over the past few decades, the pace of technological change has seemingly accelerated. Does that mean that if you are a coder, for example, your experience can quickly become outdated or does experience count? Just hold that thought, whilst I digress to what will appear to be a totally unrelated subject (but isn't).

I recently went to a literary festival hosted at the British Museum. I admit this is hardly everyone's cup of tea, listening to authors discussing books, but somehow it's the type of thing I seem to enjoy. It proved to be a great opportunity to stock on even more books, I'll still struggle to get through. In between the various talks, I had the chance to visit the rest of the British Library. One of the star attractions of the British Library is the Treasures room. It holds no gold or silver, diamonds and pearls. Instead, it has original manuscripts from creative geniuses, such as Mozart and Da Vinci. It's strange but seeing words written by their hands, somehow makes it that bit more inspiration. They might have creative geniuses, but their handwriting is just as human (and messy) as the rest of us. In among the various manuscripts, which I saw, is a letter from Ada Lovelace to Charles Babbage from 1843. It proposes a calculation which ‘may be worked out by the engine without having been worked out by human head and hands first’. This is actually the first time that the general principal of a computer program had been set out in writing. It's over 150 years since then and we are still coding!

With all the relentless change in technology, it can be tempting to think that the way people code changes very quickly. However, despite the dizzying pace in technological changes, in practice, the programming languages which folks use changes relatively slowly over time...

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