It was... I will miss that until retirement, too, but the artisan part of this craft has been gradually dying for over a decade. I think this change started when "popular kids" started confidently saying they wanted to work with computers when they grew up. The effect is the proliferation of normies throughout the trade, now many of them with 10+ years of experience. The average developer's appreciation for the elegant and the inspiring grew weaker, and the idea of putting more work into a task than absolutely necessary (like, for example, stopping for a moment to consider the context before deciding on a tool or technique to apply...) lost all appeal. There's a thin line between aggressively pragmatic and ignorant, and the newer generations seem to treat crossing that line as a non-issue as long as the ticket can be presented as resolved. This mindset used to be confined to cubicles and neckties, but now it's seemingly everywhere...
Don't mind me; I just feel unusually old and grumpy today...
Come check out some of the array languages[1,2,3], or perhaps the retro-computing comfy vibes of a system like Decker[4]. Some of us still appreciate code as poetry.
Oh, I know! While I got discouraged trying to learn K (I was a little too hung up on the notion of free software back in the day...), I learned J and had a terrific time interacting with the community. There were some bad apples, but the basket labeled "Smalltalk" is filled with many marvels. I enjoyed Factor while it was actively developed, which led me deep into Forth-land - an unforgettable experience. By the time I arrived on the other side of s-expressions, Smug Lisp Weenies were out and lots of friendly, curious, intelligent folk lived there instead. More recently, I invested some time into learning Raku - a beautifully eclectic, shockingly expressive language whose development is severely understaffed, underfunded, and underappreciated. I had a great time in all those instances - I know there are passionate people approaching programming creatively in all kinds of shapes and forms, and it's indeed heartening.
The problem is, when I go to work, I see exactly none of those people among my coworkers. I feel like breaking down on the spot and declaiming:
> I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion... I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... Time to die.
I don't, mostly out of respect to Rutger Hauer. Anyway, while in absolute terms people like that are probably much more numerous now than 20 years ago, they feel much more distant to me than ever before.
Could you not just fire the people who are not like that and hire the people who are? If not, I think you might not have enough power in the organization! Seek more power!
Also consider finding a job where you need to know category theory to understand the system! That'll give you coworkers who are magical! And a little insane!
Ps. The "C" in "C-beams" now stands for "Category Theory"!
I'm baffled. Which part of my comment triggered you so? You come across as ballistic here. Can't you just "don't mind" my comment? I specifically asked for this, signaling that I don't feel too well right now...
Yeah, the younger generation must just be wired up differently, it's all those popular kids, can't be anything to do with the proliferation of scrum, agile, and crunch that make them focused on doing all those tickets ;)
Trying to educate a boomer (new official term for a millennial) into not complaining about zoomers is like trying to convince a zoomer into not dying inside when they think they have committed an act of cringe.
It's best not to try! These are the cultural delusions that drive us!
If you're dealing with those kinds of people, make demands that they begin studying category theory. I'm talking the hard stuff - categories for the working mathematician, toposes triples and theories, sketches of an elephant, McCurdy's 2012 paper on graphical methods for Tanaka reconstruction, and Roman's 2019+ work on coend calculus and diagrammatic optics.
If they do it, if they actually learn categories, then you need to shut the f** up and let them live. They now have the power to do what they want. If they refuse to learn categories then you get to laugh at them and tell them that they are cringe, and fire them.
And if you don't have the power to just fire them for not learning categories, then you very likely need to learn categories yourself! And also gain the power to fire people, lol! There is no rational point to ever complain about a programmer, when you can just fire them instead.
It was... I will miss that until retirement, too, but the artisan part of this craft has been gradually dying for over a decade. I think this change started when "popular kids" started confidently saying they wanted to work with computers when they grew up. The effect is the proliferation of normies throughout the trade, now many of them with 10+ years of experience. The average developer's appreciation for the elegant and the inspiring grew weaker, and the idea of putting more work into a task than absolutely necessary (like, for example, stopping for a moment to consider the context before deciding on a tool or technique to apply...) lost all appeal. There's a thin line between aggressively pragmatic and ignorant, and the newer generations seem to treat crossing that line as a non-issue as long as the ticket can be presented as resolved. This mindset used to be confined to cubicles and neckties, but now it's seemingly everywhere...
Don't mind me; I just feel unusually old and grumpy today...