I think the guy isn't as up to date as he thinks/appears. There is a good case for YUI(3) being the most cutting edge JS lib there is and using CGI::App or Catalyst (or Jifty or any real kit) to do web work is distinctly modern as well. Maybe he meant hardcore in that you're doing it all yourself and not using Dreamweaver and Flex/MX or something...?

I don't recall him referring to Dreamweaver but I am quite confident that it actually leads to lower quality sites. For a start it costs a lot of money and means you understand less about what is actually going on. That may make it much harder to fix issues. Also for graphical image manipulation I use gimp which even my children are enthusiastic about. As for yui I chose it because it has a reputation for being good on web accessibility. The conversation was too short to pick up on his attitude to yui specifically.

...and by extension, you know what goes on under the hood i.e. maybe he defines new school as not requiring such knowledge since it's all abstracted away by the tools ??

Consider your car running out of petrol/gas...

• New school - change car
• Old school - fill up
Just my pen'orth
A user level that continues to overstate my experience :-))

I have noted that often this is the way young recent grads act. In fact they feel they do not need to know what is going on because they have no real penalty for just using what is out there.

We see that the best apps programers were around it the days when there was a penalty for using these tools because there was not 4Gb of memory at 4Ghz processing to just waste.

If you want to really freak one out show him an old C64 or TRS80 program and ask him to replicate it in less than 64Kb.

Most can not do it

If you are truly old school, consider it to be a badge of honor. It means you have experience, paid your dues, and established a deep foundation of knowledge that you can continuously build on. As long as you keep learning, those fresh out of school who only know the cutting edge cannot keep up. There is no better teacher than experience, and sooner than you think, today's cutting edge will be old school.

Update: from Wikipedia:

In slang, old school can refer to anything that is from an earlier era and looked upon with high regard or respect, including music, clothing and language.

So when today's cutting edge is "old school", what will today's "old school" be?

When Perl 6 is "old school" I imagine Perl 5 would be what Perl 4 is today :-)


"Everything is true." "Even false things?" "Even false things are true" "How can that be?" "I dunno man, I didn't do it."

There are many programmers out there who have very little knowledge of software outside of their own particular world, e.g. Windows IDE tools or commercial Java tools. To them, everything else sounds hardcore and old school, especially things like open source and command-line tools. I remember talking to a Java guy at a CMS conference who seemed very surprised that "people still use Perl" because he assumed the entire world was written in Java now.

I've worked in Java environments where people lived in slow and painful GUI tools and feared opening up text files. They had very little concept of how the tools they were using worked. If that's the alternative, it's much better to be old school. It allows you to understand what's going on instead of treating development like a black box.

Also, if you look at all of the most interesting and innovative websites, none of them were built with something like Adobe AIR. So, again, better to be old school if it means you have a better chance of inventing the new school.

To respond to a further comment: We also use Dreamweaver extensively, and I'm generally very satisfied with it for web design.

His example of "new school" was air.

However please understand the conversation did not come across as denigrating merely provocative - which is exactly what you want during networking. Also I do not think the specific technologies is the most interesting part of the question. I was more interested in how monks see themselves, their approaches and whether they would find these sort of questions awkward.

AIR? =)

It's great product, but to my mind it's adobe's attempt to build products based on actionscript without browser. But they are unsecured for serious applications and сannot be used on serverside. It's not "new school", it's a new way of developing client-side applications, very interesting way.

Perl is very powerful and compact programming language it's useful for both client-side and server-side applications. Now it's нard time, because new Perl 6 is not ready and almost all developers work on it. But i think that all will be GOOD, Perl is a Great Programming Language!!!

P.S. sorry for my bad English if any...

If he meant hard core or old school as in .. You're rolling your own, using CGI::Application for something that wordpress could do- Then he's potentially scolding you.

Otherwise, what he meant was instead of 'the other way'- which he had no idea what that would be- aside outsourcing the project to someone who would use CGI::Application or Catalyst, only- he wouldn't actually know that.

Sigh.