It has been said by far bigger and better minds than myself, that if you sit still, if you don't continue to learn about new things and innovate you will stagnate. This has been a huge problem looming within the business I work, certain things have worked since the industry sector was conceived and even though more than half a century has passed it has largely passed the internals of this industry by.
That is until very recently, where market competition has sprung up, the market base itself has reduced and so pressure is on... Nowhere is this more apparent in my industry than on the software, the front-line of pushing product to customers.
The trouble however seems to be that many people have stagnated, they've stuck with the safe option, the tools which work off of the shelf, I am of course talking about Windows, the entire tool chain that is used by 99% of the company is all Windows based, I am the man on the spot waving the Linux flag.
But just a few days ago, the Windows world had to come to my desk and see their future, I had to show technically minded folks around the code of the new system, introduce them to my imposed coding standard and update them from Microsoft Specific Visual C++ thinking to thinking about platform independent Standard C++ code... I had my work cut out for me. I prepared the cleanest desktop environment I could (i3 on Ubuntu).
I didn't want to startle them, so the editor/environment is Visual Code from Microsoft... They started to look at the system, it's structure, how the code related to the design and the diagrams they already had, we started to follow the process flow diagrams.
It was a success, certainly no-one burst into tears, they saw the kin-ship between this code on Linux and the systems they'd worked with for decades on Windows.
But then, the senior software manager leaned down, peering at the screen, and he said some fateful words...
"I've never seen that before".
Is he talking about some piece of C++14 or C++17, the lambda's, the auto's, the shared_ptr... What technical bolt has he not screwed his nut around?
"That's very good, you can see the whole code layout. I've never seen that before, who did you say wrote this tool?... Really Microsoft, I've never ever seen that before".
This chap uses Sublime, I've seen him using Sublime... Which does exactly the same thing....
What is the lesson to be learned? When we're talking about stagnation in software we are not only talking about the language, but also the tools, and then not only the IDE, the whole environment.
Certainly I was introducing Windows users to Linux, and even then on an unusual minimalist desktop manager, but still the lack of connection between a tool I've seen people already using and what it was capable of demonstrated tools are not being leveraged to their full potential... Certainly learn your new languages, learn your language updates, but keep your tools and environment up to spec too...
