Yes, exactly. I am planning to start the 'tautology party' with policies like 'higher taxes mean that taxes are higher'. The party will make about as much sense as the current political parties.

Incidentally [and unrelatedly] I'm 63, a programmer and grumpy. I hate every 'latest' javascript framework, stupid hipster hats and THOSE KIDS ON MY LAWN.

This comes up nearly every year on slashdot. And very year I post this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Like all Vonnegut, this is a great read BTW.

Perhaps next year a robot can post this for me? Or maybe just a plain bot would be simpler without the 'ro'?

As I'm getting older, I want to say that I do not give my consent to have sodium metal injected. It might be a bit dangerous.

To blow my own tiny trumpet for a moment, I've written and updated a manual to go with: http://sourceforge.net/project... for each release.

However, it isn't terrific AND I worked as a technical author for a number of years, doing mainframe software manuals. This is my main point, good manuals [mine is not] are hard and probably require equivalent effort to the software itself. The other big obstacle is that in, for example, mainframe world there is formal review process, formalised customer feedback, errata etc. etc. Also, manuals are planned as a 'set' installation, operation, troubleshooting, API etc.

I don't know a lot of my customers and can only correct things that appear in the Google group. In my case, since it's a niche. there's not very much.

Actually there's an opportunity here as well, in that non-code people could also participate in their favourite projects by writing guides. Indeed sometimes they do, but not often enough and they're fragmentary.

Absolutely. I'm 63 and as I and my boss used to joke 'it's the year 2000, where's my toga and my flying car?'. On a serious note, there's no reason why we shouldn't aim for utopia, but hyper-capitalism [and before anyone says anything, no, I'm not a communist] is bringing most people a gentle dystopia, poor diets, precarious work contracts for bad pay, pollution, overcrowding, intrusive state, intrusive advertising, small wars, 'war on terror', 'war on drugs', you name it. That's the first world and life is still bad in the third world too, in spite of our promises.

I do feel that life was better in many ways, in the early 1970s when I started work.

Me too for Geany. Use it for Perl.

So do I. Do you remember dropping a box of 2000 punched up but with no sequence number on them?! They really need to get off our lawn NOW!

This seems to come up a great deal here.

I'm from the UK which is probably [slightly] less dog-eat-dog than the USA also, I mainly work in a niche, [Perl] and I do contract work rather than permanent.

However I'm still working about as much as I want. I blew an interview recently, but I'm OK with that, since I performed pretty badly in it. I try and keep up and still enjoy computers and computing. So for my younger friends, and they are nearly all younger now:

• - It helps to enjoy computing, not be in it 'just' for the [increasing illusory] big money
• - Flexibility helps, the UK has a smaller square area than the US though
• - Soft skills help, I'm a pretty medium programmer but an approachable person
• - Niche skills often make a difference, everyone [except me] is an 'OK' Java person, for example
• - It helps to look ahead to up-curve trends [as long as not hypeware], I learnt a lot of Javascript/Jquery quite 'early' for example
• - The soft skills will help with the next job too, many of my 'new' contracts involve people I know somewhat, at least

That's my 2c of a euro, the html is badly formatted, but hey it's almost time for Sunday lunch.

Yes. That's exactly what's wrong with most of agile, lots of project momentum and minimal thought about 'what is this for', 'who wants this', 'will this damage the architecture' etc. Result object-oriented spaghetti and lots of unreadable post-its on a board somewhere in the first circle of development hell.

Been waiting all my life for that. I can go out in the evening now.

I'll declare interest, I work on an open source, mutual social credit system: https://sourceforge.net/projec... so I'm not neutral. But microfinance usually has high interest rates and is 'owned' by large aid organisations that have their private agendas.

Debt money is created by private institutions from thin air and 'ought' either to be based on existing deposits [full reserve banking which would 'slow' everything, not a bad thing] or money creation should be in the hands and governed by the 'users'. So I don't believe that microfinance is the 'answer' and can't find evidence either.

Or to snobby Europeans [like me!] Ca-CA

Waste of a good walk and large bits of open space used by a few quite rich people. Use the courses for public parks and communal gardens [that's allotments to we Brits] instead.

The secret is probably that [like many anoraky people] I enjoy the new things, I'm a neophile. Also, I'm not afraid to be mediocre at some things, I enjoy, a luxury I have because I don't use everything I know 'professionally' nowadays. But, if you don't enjoy technical stuff and do it 'just for money', it's harder to learn.

A couple of open source projects, however small, probably help as well, to 'fix' knowledge. 18 years pfui, get off my lawn...but seriously, yes, you can.