Re: AWK As A Major Systems Programming Language

D <nospam@example.net> writes:

On Sun, 1 Sep 2024, Johanne Fairchild wrote:
>

In my case, it is because I am not working as a programmer, so I have
not requirements to be productive or to be able to generate any income
of programming.

>
I am not programming for profit any longer.  Thank God.  I program for
beauty now.  This change has been the hardest thing I had to do and it's
been so worth it.

>
Why? How was it to work as a programmer and what was it that you
didn't like about it?

I never worked on obviously interesting systems.  (There was only one
exceptional project that I was hired to do and I felt I was doing the
type of programming that I would call cool programming.  This was one of
the last commercial projects I worked on.  By then, I was already an
independent contractor, not an employee, so this project does not even
count as something I did while an employee in a company.)  Over the
years, I felt I was just contributing to the profit of the company owner
and nothing else---not even my satisfaction was being rewarded, except
for the bill-paying type of satisfaction (if you would).

Unfortunately, to pay bills I had to spend more than I wanted of my life
as a company employee.  I had to explicitly design an operation to do a
career change and that was really worth it.

When I graduated from university, I wanted to become a programmer, but
at that time, only 10+ years of experience was wanted on the job
market, so life decided that I should work in infrastructure/system
administration instead.

I always thought of system administration as a programming job.  In
fact, a fun one.  Initially I wanted to be a UNIX system administrator.
But my professional life began in a web world when most jobs I could get
were all web related.  Deep web projects always involve UNIX
programming, but I was never really hired for deep projects.  As a
result, I kept doing web programming to pay bills.  So I had to study
and invent projects in order to study the other sides of computer
science so I would not spend my life with technology and culture I did
not even appreciate.  That actually paid off.  For the first time in my
life, I can say I really like my job.