Learning arcane bullshit from the 80s can break your computer, but if you’re willing to wade through arcane bullshit from programmers in the 90s and 2000s, you can break everyone else’s computers, too.
It’s the backbone of the entire company I work at. And I work at one of the largest companies in its field. If it went down for an extended period of time the company would grind to a halt. I guess it’s called “IBM i” now but everyone calls it AS/400
That was me in the first few months after I had to replace the senior dev when he took a better job. I was only junior for like 5 months prior to this, I also lied about having 2 years of experience in the interview and the team misunderstood my quick learning with expertise. At the end they thought I was good enough for the position but I was freaking out because I was lacking a lot of experience, I still took it because the raise was huge. I couldn’t sleep well for months while I was trying my best to learn how to do my job.
One of my favorite managers once told me while I was struggling with a severe case of imposter syndrome “if you’re faking it well enough that others can’t tell, you might not be faking it as much as you think.”
I am not a programmer, but on 2 occasions I was able to improperly fix (1 argument in 1 line stuff) very small bugs without really understanding how. I've also made a number converter (dec-bin-hex) at least twice. I know those aren't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice twice.
I'd say there's an issue here with language design having major tradeoffs, but maybe it's just a paradox*? Though I have found a language I like (even though I'm not learning it because other issues), so I know it's not impossible at least.
*= Like the people who could make something with less tradeoffs don't have the need/desire to do that, they just use the existing stuff. Though that is much more fitting for visual programming.
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