In the last years, more and more the doubt came up to me if programming is really that what I am strong in and if it is what I enjoy. Even working in different companies, where completely different software were developed, in Smalltalk, Fortran, C, C++ and and means, I always had the feeling that I doing the same frequently. The problems of software developing repeat, the kind of solutions were well-known. I met many people, all of their own style, I had bosses which could never be compared, which was and is good. But the game - software development - still was the same from my point of view. Different in colors, in tones, in details, but in fact the same. No big progress, as also some well-kown mastes of software told. And I had and have so much more interests.
I know, this picture is not objective, my losing interest and my perception of software buisness have impact on each other and are not decoupled. But which is really the cause of what doesn't matter in consequence. So I decided to take a way in my carrier which lead me away from software development. That's why I am happy to work as I told above.
But what about the hobby ? On the private side, I looked at many programming langauges, read about software processes, design patterns and new approaches in the software domain. But the doubts described above take place here again. And at the same time, old loves came back to me: philosophy, electromagnetics, teaching electronically, the question how a set of neurons can think and get insight.
I've just finished the great book "Coders at Work" of Peter Seibel, which contains interviews with some big persons of the software buisness. And the part with L Peter Deutsch, which leaves the software buisness at some late point in his life, convinced me to make this decision: even as a hobby, software development will no more the objective of my hobby activities. This means, to be precise, to look at patterns, architectures, languages for its own.
Of course, I will program to let my new ideas come to life, maybe games, graphics, experiments. But the ideas are now in front, not the question what is the best language, the best approach. I make no attempt anymore to make software development better (one exception: requirements and safety engineering). That let be the task of computer scientists, which I am not. Just be creative, as long it is possible.
For this goal, Scala and Processing had attracted my interest, which both working with the Java environment. The Java environment has so much possibilities. Erlang is nice for experiments in the artificial neural network field.
But don't misunderstand: I will not close my eyes. I will look how technology and software science is going on, because to track and judge the social impact of new things is important. But my role will be from now that of an observer, not an actor of the computer science.
