I’m an old guy too - pretty much been all those places and done all that just like you. I remember when the new fangled C++ compilers came out - I was much more excited about the graphics support in the package than the ++.
So, in fact, I wrote the article more for guys like you and me than anyone else. Things have changed; but in case you’re wondering - there still are bad programmers in the world. (LOL!) The more that gets perfected for reuse, the better.
Back in the 1980s, I worked on “toolkits” for creating certain types of applications. They weren’t perfected until they had been seasoned with the experience of at least three applications. You could have things like reading and parsing the same kind of file (why do that more than once?) and generating the same kind of file, and match them up in different ways to translate various file types in and out of the file type the toolkit was designed for. You could also provide utilities to help.
Yes, a lot has happened since then. I tried to make the article both easy to ready by not belaboring details, but hopefully enough to get the point across. The battle for reusable code is moving target (as the article points out), but what we’re looking at here is the fact that looking back on so many years of experience - there’s some meta-knowledge with the knowledge. And that just might come to something.
I do think that it is a good article.
I should also point out that I think that programming really is a young persons game. And by that I mean someone new and fresh to the Art and science of Computer programming. That person can be in their teens or into their 50’s. It’s just that they need to have a fresh point of view and that wonderment that comes with playing with a new toy.
Because that way of looking at things and the desire to play with it gets burned out fairly quickly by the bureaucracy of programming.
When I first started to program we could be given a task to complete and have a trial version within days that the user could look at, comment on and come up with details or enhancements that the user had failed to point into the initial request. And within a ‘reasonable’ amount of time a new application was born and put into official use.
By the time I got out of the biz a single line of code being changed cost a half a million bucks and 6 months of time in meetings, testing, meetings, yada-yada.