Comment by treis
3 years ago
>I was actually surprised because I heard so much about crazy new materials like carbon fibers, graphene, technologies like 3D-printing,... but apparently what makes a machine break are still the same things: mechanical stress, heat dissipation, friction,... new materials and processes might change the coefficients, but not the (mostly Newtonian) physics (my interpretation btw, not his words).
I don't really see the difference between that an programming. Writing code is still a bunch of "if" statements, the same underlying data structures, same algorithms, etc. There's some new technology being added on the top akin to carbon fiber and the other things you mentioned but it's fundamentally the same.
You really think that a SE in their 70's who learnt how to write if statements and data structures 50 years ago would say that they're still basically doing the same thing now as back then? Maybe if they work on legacy stacks like the famed COBOL devs coming back out of retirement. But the thing is that what he's working on is cutting edge, not maintaining systems that were built decades ago.