I **AM** old, tell me about it.

How I cope with Technological advance is to keep learning.

I pick a topic, say IPv6, and spend a month or so reading and playing with code until I am comfortable that I won't make a complete fool of myself in an IPv6 conversation. A Side Note: at the current rate of consumption we really will be out of IPv4 addresses in the third quarter of next year. I expect to get a fair amount of work in the few years consulting with folks who need to run dual-stack (supporting both v4 and v6 addressing) architectures. Think the likes of a shopping web-site, if you can't cope with the Customer's addressing mode, you have lost the sale to someone who can.

I just started poking at Rakudo*. There are part of it that are very familiar, and parts the make my mind itch. This is not unexpected when I start poking at any new Technology. I expect to see Perl6 become Production Ready in the next year or so, so I might even have occasion to use it in Combat. But, I don't expect Perl5 to wither away. There are too many folks that use Perl5 for business-critical things. I will have work as long as I want it. (After all, Perl5 has been reported as a dying/dead language by the Media how many times in the past year or so?)

I learned some time back that there is a language called 'Programming' and, once you have some facility with it, other programming languages (Perl, Ruby, FORTRAN, Lisp, ...) can be learned as dialects of the Ur-language. You have to translate the idioms from Programming into the particular dialect you are writing, but. As to the HTML5 issue -- there is another Ur-Language called 'Display'....

There is an quote from Stephen J Gould (I think, I've seen various attributions) that applies to the problem of Technological Change:

"Biologists have a word for something that doesn`t change; that word is 'dead'."

UPDATE

The quote is from J. S. B. Haldane, and it's even more appropriate:

"Biologists have a word for people who have stopped learning; that word is 'Dead'."

So what are your plans, And How you're willing to deal with this?

I tend to learn technologies that are interesting, used everywhere or important to me.

I don't jump onto every hype. I just don't like some technologies, even if they are very wide-spread (like flash).

You don't have to early adaptor of every new technology; not even of those that seem important at first sight.

I use Perl 6 because it excites me, and it's very nice to use. I use IPv6 occasionally, because it has certain technical advantages. I haven't looked into HTML5 yet, because I'm not working on a very web-y project at the moment.

Perl 6: The upcoming Perl 6 means I'll have to invest a lot of time to understand how it works.

IPv6: It was promoted on the news & published on many websites that people will start to acquire/use IPv6

HTML5: The new HTML 5

Power Shell: This one might be old

So what are your plans, And How you're willing to deal with this?

Heh, this is computer stuff we're talking about. Despite people having the opposite idea, things don't change rapidly. Nor is any of it rocket science.

The IPv4 pool really is shrinking, which is already encouraging smaller IPv6 deployments. Even if a wide-scale deployment of IPv6 is a long ways off, mixed deployments are already happening. So studying up on it (especially how mixed environments are handled), paying attention to which network related modules support IPv6 and which ones don't, etc. seems worthwhile. I wouldn't spend a lot of time on it, but I also wouldn't just ignore it anymore.

Regarding HTML5, you really missed the mark on this one -- sites are already using HTML5 e.g. to stream videos without using Flash. A common one is streaming video to iPhone and iPad users, but e.g. YouTube also uses it to stream video to Chrome. Most of the browsers out there already have some form of support and Internet Explorer 9 will have HTML5 support. Take a look at this web designer checklist (scroll down past the CSS3 sections). I think you underestimated how consumer devices are driving fairly rapid HTML5 adoption. Lack of Flash support on the iPhone in particular may have helped accelerate things.

As for PowerShell, that's only relevant to Windows developers and sysadmins, though I'm surprised you never heard of it, given that one of the goals is to make it possible to use the commandline to do things that used to require a GUI (the way it is implemented reminds me of AREXX). If you want to learn more, check out Windows PowerShell.

Elda Taluta; Sarks Sark; Ark Arks

The IPv4 pool really is shrinking, but then again entire ip blocks were handed away willy nilly in the early days to organizations that didn't need even a 100th of the IPs they were given. If some of those unused blocks were re-assigned according to need, the pool would start expanding rather than shrinking.

I'm a network admin for a small ISP, well I was anyway until I took leave to work on another project. We don't have a shortage of IPv4 IPs for the foreseeable future. The blocks we have are continuously re-shuffled to free up larger blocks of IPs as we change out equipment. There's a constant push from vendors to buy new hugely expensive, excessive capacity IPv6 equipment complete with bleeding edge IPv4 <-> IPv6 translation hardware. The sales pitch is always the same: IPv4 is going to run out. I think they just ran out of buyers for IPv4 equipment in a market that's saturated with cheap off the shelf equipment.

Nearly every organization runs some sort of NATed internal network. From homes, to schools to small businesses and large organizations. There's a virtually unlimited number of internal IPs you can assign without ever having to touch the shrinking IPv4 pool. Really, how many computer systems would even be safe on the internet were it not for the fact that they had an internal NATed IP that wasn't directly addressable from the outside world.

Sure there are problems and difficulties with NATed IPs. It involves translation of addresses, forwarding of packets, wrappers within wrappers that add overhead and processing costs (and expense). It makes it difficult to get access to your devices away from home. But these same things also make you anonymous on the net. My tinfoil hat tells me that the real push for IPv6 is coming from the intellectual property giants who want to control every aspect of every byte between you and them. With IPv6 there's no need for NAT any more and company X has a direct line of communication to your device Y. From manufacture to sale (and resale) any where in the world, any time you plug it into a network. Did you renew your license to use that shiny new IPv6 network card? Zap, sorry it will start working again when you buy a new subscription.

As for PowerShell, that's only relevant to Windows developers and sysadmins, though I'm surprised you never heard of it,

I started my computer life on a Unix box. Never looked back. Haven't used Windows long enough to even know how to install something on such a box, let alone be a developer or sysadmin on it. Never owned a device running Windows, never had a box with Windows on my desk at $WORK. Or any previous @WORK.

I did once port a 1500 line shell script I wrote to Windows though (I had someone else to deploy and run it for me). But that required only a single line change (yeah, POSIX).

Perl 6

Not yet relevant for me. I just got rid of Perl 5.8, using 5.10 for daily work, considering update to 5.12. I won't use Perl 6.0.0.0, I will wait until things settle and we see something like Perl 6.2 or at least 6.0.2.0

IPv6

Played with it in a university lab. Considering to play with it again, now that things have settled. But not relevant until my provider offers and advertises IPv6. I currently use exactly two public IP addresses, one shared with many other people on my shared webspace, and one for my DSL dialup. And I don't think I need more public IP addresses. My DSL router uses NAT, so I can use thousands of private IP addresses in my LAN, and no one from outside my LAN can access machines inside my LAN unless I explicitly forward ports. The IPv6 people say that this is wrong, that all of my machines including my microwave oven, my dish washer, my alarm clock, and my vacuum cleaner should have (public) IPv6 addresses. I don't like that, so I would set up IPv6 in a way that my DSL router would do IPv6 NAT. So I would end with exactly the same situation: One public address and as many private addresses as I want. Currently, IPv6 has only disadvantages for me: extra work and for most stuff, IPv4 is still needed, while IPv6 does not gain anything. It will change in the future, but until then, I will continue using IPv4.

HTML 5

Well, HTML 4 plus a few new features, like audio, video and more input types. Plus a nice and short doctype declaration. I can't wait to see modern browsers support it, together with CSS 3. Until then, I will stay with HTML 4.01 strict or transitional, plus CSS 2, plus JQuery. Backwards compatibility for the new features of HTML 5 in old browsers will be an interesting problem. Especially the new input types, that will all fall back to a simple text input in old browsers.

Power Shell

What's that? And why the heck should a shell mess with windows? bash has everything I need when I need a shell.

Alexander

HTML5: The new HTML 5 Also means I'll have to set down and start learning about the new tags, features ...etc.

If there's one hype I wish would die (but know it won't), its HTML5. Basically, in an effort to give us more semantic tags to use (since XHTML died due to one browser not supporting real XHTML), they've pretty much reintroduced presentational tags and changed rules willy-nilly (oh wait, not willy-nilly, it was design by committee... A committee of browser vendors who long for the days of <embed> and <blink> tags!). And clients doing more work (including dealing with security) and making legal things that aren't legal in HTML4 like anchors wrapping block elements... which wouldn't bother 99% of web sites out there, since they're already doing stuff like that (.000006% of sites even bother validating anyway :/ ).

But, unless you're a front-end web developer, you don't need to worry about HTML5. I'm a front-end web developer, and I'm sitting here not worrying about it. Most people are throwing on the <!doctype html> and then adding canvas (great, more js for me to block), the redundant header, footer, and aside, and audio/vidio tags. You can otherwise still write HTML4 with it if you want. Or the seXy X version if you want. So far as I know, nothing breaks, which makes it an easy learning curve.

Sorry for the bitterness, but many of us in front-end are quite unhappy with most of the ideas coming along with HTML5... but we have the choice to not use them, so it's not so bad. Don't worry: HTML4 is not getting replaced by HTML5, just as Perl5 is not getting replaced by Perl6.

Perl 6: The upcoming Perl 6 means I'll have to invest a lot of time to understand how it works.

No more than the usual 'I better check out this new stuff' while you continue to do Perl 5.

Pv6: It was promoted on the news & published on many websites that people will start to acquire/use IPv6 which means I'll have to invest more time to understand how it works OR I'll have no idea about networking.

IPv6 is at a level that 99% of us won't ever need to worry about.

HTML5: The new HTML 5 Also means I'll have to set down and start learning about the new tags, features ...etc.

So you expand your knowledge about how the new tags work. That doesn't sound like a bad thing.

Power Shell: This one might be old, but I used to use windows wizards, GUI interfaces but using the Power Shell seems to be easier and a good way to automate things so here's a new scripting experience you'll have to acquire too.

Go ahead and use the new tool if you like; I'm perfectly happy with gvim and a pile of xterm windows.

Although I am not too old, but I already feel outdated.

Pffffft. Buddy, I finished high school in 1975. I grew up with teletypes, 110 baud modem, paper tape and punch cards. In this business you learn and grow, or you get into some other business. :)

I believe a lot of the stuff you're concerned about is new features on an old platform. The old stuff isn't (much) going to disappear.

I don't worry about it too much. I'm a generalist, but I don't try to know everything. I spend a little time learning what interests me (currently Haskell and Parrot PIR), and a little time learning what I need to for work (currently Catalyst). I'm usually interested in the stuff that I need for work, so that works out nicely.

When something new and shiny comes my way, I play with it for a little bit to see if I'm interested. If so, I study it more. Otherwise, I don't. Parrot passed that test for me, PowerShell didn't.

It's no fun chasing knowledge you feel obligated to learn. The whole point of the path I've chosen is to enjoy what I'm doing and to learn how I can enjoy it more with different tools.

You're at an advantage.

You bless to get an object in perl5, well, there's a default "thing" that well bless for you. You can use bless yourself. There, you know something about perl6 in the language you already know. It's just augmented. The culture is still there. If you know Moose, some things will be quite familiar. There's still, "my", strict is enforced by default etc.

ipv6? Longer ips with segmentation so you can form your own assignments in house.

Html5? html4 + new stuff. You have some new tags. You know half this stuff already. The a tag may have changed, I don't know, but if it has, I'm sure I'll learn it quickly enough over time.

Make some mistakes while learning this stuff. Everyone will. Some people are already experts because they are designing it or want to be involved so early on. Or both. Chances are, your mistakes will teach how some things are done wrong. The feedback loop continues.

And hell, if you learn some perl6, some html5 and some ipv6 by year end, you'll probably be on the far side of the bell curve. Jump in! The water isn't fine just yet. :D

It is generally not neccessary to know how it works all the way down.

It is usually enough to know what it is to a certain degree. Concepts and ideas are far more important than syntax details.

What works well enough for me is to pirate (I know I am a bad person) technical books, put them on my old Palm-pilot and read them while on the train/bus etc. In this way I use time that would otherwise be wasted anyway and I actually find it entertaining.

In this way I get a high-level understanding about things that I can then deepen should the need arise.

The secret for dealing with change is:   do not fear it.   The digital computer is, and was, itself “an instrument of radical change,” and it has never afforded anyone in this industry the luxury of standing still.   I hope, and expect, that it never will.

Computers are critical components of ongoing business operations that have nothing to do with computers, but which cannot be pursued without them.   This means that there will always be a curious split:   even as we pursue new technologies, we find ourselves maintaining mission-critical applications that are thirty or more years old.   (In another twenty years, they will be “fifty or more years old.”)   So, it is really the case that the job keeps expanding.   And that, for thirty-odd years now in my case, is still what I enjoy the most about this industry.  

(It’s also very nice that experience is still a thing that is very much prized... by some.   And those who do not prize it... keep losing games and don’t figure out why.)

“Change,” in this business, “is a fact of life,” and it has always been so.   And yet, the fundamental nature of the machinery has not changed, nor have the fundamental business purposes to which the machinery is applied.   Thus, throughout all of the 30 years (so far) that I have been in this business, I can see an unmistakable continuity.   Believe it or not, most things remain exactly the same.

Throughout the entire history of the computer, the hardware has been advancing rapidly, and the software has been very eagerly playing catch-up.   Every one of the advances that you speak of are simply the latest flip of that very old coin.   It has also always been true that we build upon the past, and keep it around, even as we insist that the past is surely about ready to be buried.   (It never actually happens, because computer software is actually extremely durable.   Much more so than any physical artifact of machinery.)

So, the bottom line is:   (a) “get used to it,” and (b) don’t seriously worry about becoming obsolete or irrelevant.   I happen to believe now, as I have always believed, that one of the very best part of being in this business – and of being good at it, as we all are – is that it never becomes boring.   It never ceases to be challenging.   And it is certainly never difficult to say, either to an executive or to yourself, that “what I am doing has great, and immediate, business value.”   The Perl community in particular is certainly a cutting-edge example of this.   The very best folks in this business are right here.

(Oh, phooey!)   As you may have guessed (by its loquaciousness?), the preceding “anonymous monk” posting is mine.