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My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

blog.jonasoberg.net

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Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#81

Post by cr0sh »

bigtunacan wrote: post #60
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.

Definitely games. This is what got me first hacking when I was a kid. Now as a parent, my oldest daughter (now 13), has been hacking on things for a few years now. First it was with Legos, then Minecraft modding, and most recently she's been trying to hack Movie Star Planet. Believe me; I was quite shocked we she came to me out of the blue and was like, "Hey dad; can you come take a look at this? I'm having a problem…

> and that she was doing traffic analysis on her games to see if she could hack the data being passed around

I hope you had - either after or prior to that point - a heart to heart talk with your daughter about what she was doing.

It's one thing to do that on a game or whatnot - but we all know where that can lead, whether accidentally or deliberately, and we have all heard stories of people (usually guys - but I bet that's going to change in the future) doing something "for the lulz" or "because they were curious" or "just to see what would happen" - and then quickly finding themselves on the dark end of a TLA agent.

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#82

Post by eliaslfox »

SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #71
_rpd wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Your question as asked has lots of reasonable answers, such as the fact humans aren't all that intelligent on average, and certainly not some asymptotic limit we're aiming for. That said, AI is here to stay.

"humans aren't all that intelligent on average"

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#83

Post by cr0sh »

tonyarkles wrote: post #48
blowski wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this argument all the time and it makes no sense to me. If I hire somebody to put my Ikea furniture together, I'm not disappointed to learn they're not a skilled carpenter. When I hire a children's entertainer, I'd be surprised to learn they were an extremely talented musician. There are people out there who know how everything works under the hood, and that's great. But they're typically expensive and unavail…

It's great, if they can solve the problem! My experience, as a kid who self-taught C after feeling that QBasic was too limiting, is that to debug problems, you often need to go a level or two deeper than the code you're working on. As an example, I've encountered bugs with Python libraries that I had to debug using GDB. If I wasn't comfortable with C, my only option would have been to throw my hands up in the air and…

> my only option would have been to throw my hands up in the air...

..."like you don't care!"

/word up! //sorry, had to do it...

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#85

Post by gens »

kibwen wrote: post #24
gens wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that without the unreasonable hype behind rust nobody would even mention safety.

Rust has hype because it has safety, not the other way around. :P

Rust has hype because it is mozilla, servo, and mozilla blog posts about it.

But that is not the point i was making. There are a lot of languages that "have safety". Ada is a prime example as it "has" more "safety" and is really old. And yet nobody talked about Ada before rust came with "safety".

With static analyzers and valgrind even C has enough of memory "safety". (note that Ada has more "safety" then just memory access)

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#86

Post by tmccrmck »

monksy wrote: post #30
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.

I think there is a concern in forcing kids to learn how to program vs gatekeeping and self-taught developers. With gatekeeping/a tightly knit community: modding, building a PC, and developing a game becomes an achievement that the kids do. It encourages them to succeed to become apart of the community. With having training/classes apart of the curriculum: It removes the reward of solving the problem and removes a sen…

As someone with a background in teaching CS at the high school and university level, I've had this sentiment for the last few years but have never articulated it as well as you've just done.

I went back to my old high school a few years ago to see the AP Computer Science class and the difference in the students was marked to say the least.

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#87

Post by tmccrmck »

gens wrote: post #85
kibwen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust has hype because it has safety, not the other way around. :P

Rust has hype because it is mozilla, servo, and mozilla blog posts about it. But that is not the point i was making. There are a lot of languages that "have safety". Ada is a prime example as it "has" more "safety" and is really old. And yet nobody talked about Ada before rust came with "safety". With static analyzers and valgrind even C has enough of memory "safety". (note that Ada has more "safety" then just memory…

With static analyzers and valgrind even C++ has a lot of memory safety. See Herb Sutter's talks.

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#89

Post by godelski »

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…

> 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 am sure you are correct in this statement, but I do not believe in hones in on what the point of the article is. The point is that now that we know people learn in this manner we should do what we can to provide as many learning avenues for future generations. Certainly people will always find avenues, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't provide as many opportunities that we can.

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#90

Post by kibwen »

gens wrote: post #85
kibwen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust has hype because it has safety, not the other way around. :P

Rust has hype because it is mozilla, servo, and mozilla blog posts about it. But that is not the point i was making. There are a lot of languages that "have safety". Ada is a prime example as it "has" more "safety" and is really old. And yet nobody talked about Ada before rust came with "safety". With static analyzers and valgrind even C has enough of memory "safety". (note that Ada has more "safety" then just memory…

> There are a lot of languages that "have safety".

Yes, and in the past twenty-five years these languages have stolen away 90% of developer mindshare from C and C++. The only niches that have held against the onslaught are those that thought that language-enforced memory-safety imposed runtime costs that they couldn't afford, coupled with a complete and total obliviousness to the actual cost of memory-unsafe code--especially over public networks. By the time that the internet (née Internet) became ubiquitous, Ada's name was already mud due to its prolonged standardization process, and it certainly didn't help that there existed no freely-available production-quality implementation until the late 90s. Even if Rust weren't here, Ada just isn't positioned to capture mindshare from the modern crop of developers weaned on dynamic languages, because not only does Ada not provide memory-safe dynamic allocation without a GC (Rust does), but it also doesn't have accessible documentation (all the books that I can find cost money, unlike Rust's free book, and all the standard API documentation that I can find is in PDF format only, unlike Rust's generated HTML docs with built-in search), and it also doesn't provide a package manager (which also kills C and C++ for people who started programming with Ruby/Python/Node), and it doesn't have any of the modern niceties that people expect from languages in this decade (I can't find anything to indicate that Ada supports any kind of closures that don't have to be hacked together manually, and its support for first-class functions seems dubious).

So let me amend my earlier pithy statement: Rust has hype because it's a language with modern amenities that has memory safety with no garbage collector. Nobody's disputing that Ada is safe, but Ada's lack of hype today is not because its safety is deficient, nor is it because programmer's don't care about safety. :P

> With static analyzers and valgrind even C has enough of memory "safety".

Citation needed. :)

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