Helping my students overcome command-line bullshittery (2014)

No, it's not a meaningless nitpick! Yes, general purpose computers need to be programmed, but the reason we do it with a command line is because we prefer keyboards for data entry. When we stop using keyboards we will stop using command lines, just as we've stopped using punch cards. Everything that's not manually and physically setting voltages on memory is an abstraction. It's important to note that the command line is more an UI than an abstraction, though. Where the command line is on the abstraction level depends on implementation. Which one UI we use depends on convenience.

>Sure, it would be nice if you could spend the majority of your time on the fun stuff, and it looks like your predecessors certainly tried. But in that case you should probably not actually write software and choose a more theoretical career path if you can't be bothered to learn how to use a hammer.

You didn't understand what OP's post was getting at, you didn't what my post was getting at, yet you still managed to be condescending. Congratulations.

I'm curious - what's your motivation for being interested in tech? Have you given some thought about what drives you?

I've found, personally, that my motivation has changed fairly dramatically over the years, and with it, my perspective on high-level vs. low-level programming. When I was in high school and college, my motivation was that I wanted to feel competent - I wanted a skill that was all my own, that I could master without anyone telling me I had to. Immediately after college, through my first job & startup, my motivation was to get rich, or at least develop a financial position better than my peers. While I was at Google, my motivation was to earn the respect of my peers, and now that I'm out on my own trying out startup ideas, my motivation is to test my intuitions about the software industry.

When I wanted to feel competent or earn the respect of my peers, I've usually gravitated toward low-level technologies and concepts, things that were hard conceptually or close to the machine but didn't have much practical application. Haskell, lambda calculus, compiler design, blazingly fast code, the bits & bytes of network protocols. When I wanted to get rich or test out my ideas, I've gravitated toward very high-abstraction, productivity-enhancing, flavor-of-the-month technologies. Javascript (in 2007, before it became hot), frontend dev, Polymer, React, native mobile development, Parse & Firebase, etc. I currently care very little about tech, because I've learned that in the grand scheme of things it will usually not make-or-break a business idea.

When I read your post, I'm curious why you use terms like "wimpy abstraction user" or "superficial pleasantries" or "generations of programmers who not only don't know this stuff". That seems to imply that you don't respect these programmers. Why? Frontend devs frequently make more than backend devs, and have many more job opportunities to choose from. The people who make the most (founding CEOs) often have the wimpiest coding skills of all. What makes for a status hierarchy where the closer to the machine you are, the higher the status? Not saying it's wrong - I've certainly felt like this at times too. But given that I'm now in my "study reality and poke it in certain ways to see why it behaves like it does" phase, I'm curious.

FWIW, paradoxically I've found that each time I've moved from a core motivation, it's because I've found that I can never achieve what was motivating me. So my "feel competent" phase ended when I started digging deeper into all the subfields of computer science and realized I could never master it all. My "get rich" phase ended when I realized that I already had enough and no matter how much money I earned, there would always be something else I might want, if I let myself. My "respect of my peers" phase ended when I realized that there will always be some people who liked you and some people who hated you and that which side they fell on depended more on how you treat them than on anything you accomplish yourself, so really all I needed was the respect of myself. Maybe the "test my intuitions" phase will end when I decide that no matter how much information I have or what I experience, there will always be an alternate explanation, but I suspect that will trigger an existential crisis that I'm not quite ready for. There's probably some brilliant Nietzschean revelation in there somewhere, but I'll settle for some observations on status & respect in programming communities. ;-)

I'm a command line chauvinist and I'm not ever going to apologize for it.

> [Incidental complexity] arises simply because modern research software development is a messy jumble of open-source tools tied together by the duct tape of command-line scripts.

That's ironic, I think the output of modern CS research is this way because students don't learn this "bullshittery". Good luck getting your interesting research to compile elsewhere with that makefile that you copied off of stackoverflow and edited with hardcoded values until it built.

This past summer I worked for about a week and a half with a local startup trying to exist in fitness-watch IoT. They wanted to flash the boards with some proprietary tool provided in the board devkit. I wanted to flash the board using flashrom. They were content using a cloud compiler that had a costly license and hooked in the bootloader magically using a closed source library. I wanted to get us using arm-none-eabi- and a proper build system.

They wanted to press a green button in their IDE. They wanted their familiar starting point of

    int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {  }

And that's the real hidden tax of not learning this "bullshittery"-- a lack of an ability or urge to learn or do more. Oh, we need to do OTA flashing? Well we don't understand the bootloader. Or the flashing process.

Good. luck. with. that.

And I guess that's fine if your goal is just to make theoretical software for a paper. But if you're trying to make code that isn't meant to be disposed of, you need to know what's going on underneath-- you need to be able to explore things from first principles.