My Kid Will Never Hack Linux • Hacker News Board

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#61

Post by jbob2000 » Wed, May 17, 2017, 5:07 PM UTC

synack wrote: post #11

Games. The first computers kids will start to wonder about are the ones they're using to play games, be it a game console, tablet, or PC. Modding comes first, slightly tweaking the game to add a new item, map, or remove some annoying limitation. The truly curious and persistent kids will eventually want to learn how to make their own games. This is where you'll find the next generation of programmers.

Can confirm, caught the programming bug by using Warcraft 3's map editor. It had a really powerful drag'n'drop script editor, which made it very accessible for me to learn about variables, conditionals, and events.

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#62

Post by jbob2000 » Wed, May 17, 2017, 5:09 PM UTC

tannhaeuser wrote: post #55

daxorid wrote: post #8

Children growing up today won't learn C programming by reading the Linux kernel source code. With any luck, children growing up today won't learn C at all, or at least ONLY for historical understanding. It is an absolute security nightmare. Do we not want the next generation to exclusively use safe languages?

Thing is, for understanding why Rust is the way it is, you need to suffer through memory leaks and eg. buffer overflows, segfaults, lack of strict typing, etc. Same with most frameworks I know, regardless of where in the stack. That's why I believe Java is a bad educational language, and Donald Knuth uses MIX assembly in his books.

That's like saying, "to understand why the automobile is valuable, you need to suffer through a horse and carriage".

You don't need to suffer through yesterday's problems to understand today's.

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#63

Post by [deleted] » Wed, May 17, 2017, 5:14 PM UTC

gabesullice wrote: post #21

Perhaps I need a history lesson, but I don't think the kernel developers 25 years ago had any idea that some kid would be learning C through the code they wrote. I also doubt the engineers at Texas Instruments thought that enabling programs on my TI-84 would spawn my or many others' passion for programming. It was simply coincidence paired with curiosity. I think curious children of the right mindset will find the op…

[deleted]

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#64

Post by Jtsummers » Wed, May 17, 2017, 5:19 PM UTC

nv-vn wrote: post #31

toast0 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do we not want the next generation to exclusively use safe languages? Someone has to write (and maintain) the safe languages.

Not like it requires C to implement a new language.

This is a remarkably common belief and it bugs me to no end. I don't know why, but many people have developed this conviction that C is required for computers to work, that that's the baseline of computation. This comes from both novices and experts. I haven't figured it out.

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#65

Post by Jtsummers » Wed, May 17, 2017, 5:21 PM UTC

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #58

Jtsummers wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I think programming on the TI-84 was deliberately intended to get people interested. Math textbooks from the 1980s and 1990s included BASIC snippets at the end of chapters/sections (in the US). The dialects varied, but porting was a trivial task. In the 1980s there was a push for programming as part of the standard curriculum. Whether it was TI's corporate intent, or motivated by satisfying educators' goals…

As a completely irrelevant aside, I quickly moved onto Z80 assembly when I was a kid because TI-BASIC was so slow and limited. It was amazing getting sprites drawn at real-time rates.

Same, though I was too dumb[0] to grok what I was doing in high school. It took me until my third CS course in college to finally understand what I was doing at that level of programming.

[0] Not really dumb. I was accomplishing my goals, but I had no understanding. It was a combination of rote copying and imitation, and dumb luck.

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#66

Post by camtarn » Wed, May 17, 2017, 5:22 PM UTC

rijoja wrote: post #27

camtarn wrote: post #4

While I like the sentiment - hacking a flying car seems like a terrible example! Regulations on any flying passenger transport don't seem like they would, or should, ever allow this to happen. Hacking around on the flying car's infotainment systems, suitably isolated from the rest of the flying car's systems - sure.

People have been doing that to cars for years, and if you have an object weighing a ton or so moving at 50 km/h, we're dealing with 16 Mega Joule already so hacking cars should not be that different. If you are not able to do anything significantly bad, you will probably not be able to do anything remotely useful either.

I guess it depends what you're doing.

Remapping some engine timings, where the worst thing that could happen is you blow up your engine: mostly fine, although there's a small risk that you cause an accident if that causes you to lose acceleration on the highway. Reading OBD or CAN buses, fine. Writing to the buses: nope nope nope.

And that's just for cars. Flying cars, where many system failures result in an inability of the car to stay in the air: I'd expect this to be thoroughly illegal and heavily prosecuted, because I for one quite like being alive and not underneath a crashed flying car.

Does this stifle innovation? For sure. Does it restrict one's ability to modify the things you own? Definitely. Are aircraft regs sometimes over the top? (For instance, preventing you from updating old built-in gps systems, as came up on HN recently.) Yup. But the regs exist for good reasons.

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#67

Post by _rpd » Wed, May 17, 2017, 5:27 PM UTC

nv-vn wrote: post #36

z92 wrote: post #26

Your children will probably be learning AI, ML and neural networks instead of the lower level stuffs which their dads completed working on.

That bubble's gonna pop eventually, I don't foresee it staying around for 10+ more years.

What do you think will stop artificial intelligence from becoming a closer and closer approximation of human intelligence?

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#68

Post by PeterisP » Wed, May 17, 2017, 5:29 PM UTC

toast0 wrote: post #29

daxorid wrote: post #8

Children growing up today won't learn C programming by reading the Linux kernel source code. With any luck, children growing up today won't learn C at all, or at least ONLY for historical understanding. It is an absolute security nightmare. Do we not want the next generation to exclusively use safe languages?

> Do we not want the next generation to exclusively use safe languages? Someone has to write (and maintain) the safe languages.

You can easily write the compilers/interpreters/other tooling in high level, memory safe languages. Not all, but quite a few of those safe languages have their tooling built in the same language

PyPy is written in Python, golang has a compiler made in go, etc. Many others do rely in part on LLVM, but in the "long future" there's no technical reason why a common component like LLVM has to be written in C/C++, who knows, people might switch to something else written in a memory-safe language.

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#69

Post by PeterisP » Wed, May 17, 2017, 5:30 PM UTC

moosingin3space wrote: post #53

toast0 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do we not want the next generation to exclusively use safe languages? Someone has to write (and maintain) the safe languages.

Counterexample: Rust compiler is written in Rust.

Doesn't Rust compilation rely on LLVM for all the actual compilation from IR to machine code?

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#70

Post by mmphosis » Wed, May 17, 2017, 5:34 PM UTC

osullivj wrote: post #40

My kid will never learn Z80 assembler on a Sinclair micro.

Probably not unless they are interested historians, but who can predict? Hardware of tomorrow may have open quantum cores that simulate the Sinclair micro down to a microscopic scale. The future internet archive may include tooling to port their designs to Z80 assembler on the fly.

    Make a flying car run on the Sinclair micro.
    Show me the assembly code.

Anything is possible.