Open Comments Thread for "Eastwood, Stallone, and You: Are You a Typecast Developer?" by Donna Davis

One of the greatest Hollywood movies ever made, Sunset Boulevard, is about an out of work screenwriter and a faded silent star.

The mythos in programming is that sticking to an outdated technology necessarily makes one as pathetic as Gloria Swanson, who in the last scene of Sunset Boulevard imagines she is again a silent star.

However, we don't have to take the message straight. For in fact, Swanson's triumph is real because it's the WRITER who dies...not her. She correctly realizes that it's all an illusion, unlike William Holden.

Therefore, while I find Donna's essay true and amusing, I also have to say that you don't have to reinvent yourself if you'd rather work on your garage. Many Cobol programmers had a second act in 1999 and a buddy of mine, a Cobol expert, is gainfully employed in his sixties.

We have to disentangle myth, from reality. Diane Ladd is an aging blonde and former cutie who as such faced a grim prospect. But the old girl hung in there as Laura Dern's Mom and got to play her own worst nightmare, for Diane Ladd is the evil Mom in the great film Wild at Heart.

Spiritually, Diane faced up to the old nightmare of the blonde bombshell and discovered that there's more to acting than looks: there's also acting.

Gloria KNEW, at the end of Sunset Boulevard, that she was an old gal. Point was she was still in the game whereas Bill Holden was floating face down. And she KNEW that the closeup would expose her age, which she nonetheless proposed to market because as they say, they're ain't no shame in working the game.

None of this should be understood as a defense of unwillingness to change. At the same time, older developers have a choice to exit the game, reengineer, or to go retro in the sense of using their knowledge of older systems.

I for one would LOVE to see a book detailing older programming paradigms with modern simulators as an accretive history of software.