I did some Ada in college. It's incredibly powerful, but it can be pretty difficult to work with. I don't know where else is used other than aviation and the military.
+1 for Ada. Loved they way it made tasks and monitors etc explicit. Easy to work with low level hardware. Liked the subtyping too. Often compilation => correct.
It's hard for me top put into words fully but I'll attempt. Also it's not just web development in particular but really any sort of user facing / LOB / etc. application (I've done a little mobile and desktop dev as well)
For starters I haven't felt challenged by anything in years. I understand this could easily be more of the jobs I'm working, but for a while now it's seemed that the solution to almost anything is "grab x dependency and plug it in" or becomes related to hardware more than anything. It feels like majority of the fun / interesting problems have been solved and I'm just gluing them together with business logic, and the times I do end up diving into debugging what I think is an interesting problem, it was just me doing something stupid.
it also feels like all the tech is the same. Look at the job listings for any city outside the West Coast or Northeast and all the jobs are Java, .NET, maybe PHP or Node.js and likely several versions behind. I don't personally mind C# (what i currently work with), but it just kinda gets dull quick.
Finally, I guess there are just things I'm interested more. Particularly low level stuff (played around with 6502 programming and design probably around five years ago, and more recently have played with / theorized integrating vintage hardware with modern OS's for fun),etc.
Maybe the fact is that I don't fully understand that stuff, so it intrigues me more and when I finally feel knowledgeable, it will quickly lose interest, but even if I go back to doing web applications or something similar in the end, it's nice to try other things while I'm young.
Yeah I grew up in the outer suburbs of the Atlanta metro and now live in the suburbs of a smaller southern city. And I see absolutely no reasons why suburban life would appeal to a young, single male especially like myself who can't drive. Im planning to get the hell out in a few years and live in a denser city, and maybe, if I'm able to retire, live in a rural area somewhere off a nice river.
Interestingly, the suburban are I live in now if in the middle of a lower income neighborhood and a typical middle-class southern suburb. There is slight walkability, but only towards the poorer area, the sidewalk abruptly ends heading the other way
Not only that, almost every job posting I see for mainframe development wants a decade of experience working with the systems, and that's not something you can reasonably expect to self teach. I imagine most of the people who have significant experience with mainframes are retiring nowadays
I love vintage computing and have wanted a 5100 for a few years now. Unfortunately the only time I've ever seen one on sale was about a year or two ago and I just couldn't afford it
> There, all for free on the web no need to go back to school.
Oh, I don't doubt that self teaching is an option, I've just imagined this particular subfield would place more weight on a degree given that it probably requires more actual CS knowledge
> You'd still be writing code to make the hardware do stuff, just more work to achieve the same. So it might not be that exciting after a while.
Unfortunately I fear you may be right on this. It's a shame I lose interest in my hobbies as soon as I start doing them as work
