Einstein, Technology Development & the Video Remote

My grandmother, who could do very many things, couldn't work a video remote. When I first realized this I wondered, when I get old, would I be able to program in a new language of the future? Or, like my grandmother, will I think of it as the video player I can't control? In the 80's when my "MIS" department was programming in RPG code I was developing new solutions using the cutting edge dBase III for database driven applications.

What reminded me of this was coming across Paul Graham's Blub Paradox. To quote:

"After a certain age, programmers rarely switch languages voluntarily. Whatever language people happen to be used to, they tend to consider just good enough"

The future is looking bleak. Unless of course, we all take action. The good folk over at The Pragmatic Programmers teach: "Learn at least one new language every year"

Good advice. So don't grow old. Stay young by learning Apex and the Force.com platform by downloading the developer library! (Free, registration required, though that gets you the developer edition account, which you'll need 'cos the language is in the cloud).

Another quote from that piece by Paul Graham is:

"Programs that write programs? When would you ever want to do that? Not very often, if you think in Cobol. All the time, if you think in Lisp."

And this relates directly to Einstein's observation that, "The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them." Development in the cloud is a paradigm that must be embraced if organizations and programmers are to keep up with the current day pace of innovation.