What’s wrong with developers today?

I don’t understand people today. They seem so brittle and inflexible, unwilling to open their minds and learn.

When I was fresh out of university, my only programming experience was with FORTRAN on mainframes. My first job was on the newest technology of the day: DEC PDP-11. Subsequently, I had jobs working on Tandem NonStop computers (Guardian OS and TAL programming language), Modcomp systems and their assembler, Unix and C, VAX and DCL, AS/400, Windows, Smalltalk and Seaside, Python and web2py, Java and Android, Objective-C and iOS, etc. Each and every job was an exciting, stimulating learning opportunity. It was fun diving into unexplored territory.

These various environments were quite different from one another. But I had no trouble adapting. The various programming languages had substantially different syntaxes. But I wasn’t bothered. It took little time for me to get comfortable with each new language.

So why is Smalltalk giving people conniptions? Are they really so spoiled? I am really, truly puzzled.

Was there something special about my generation? Was there something special about me? I don’t think so.