> But there is something becoming more familiar to me as I go back to the wild west of C programming (where very little happens behind the scenes I might point out - no garbage collection here!). I share this sentiment. I pursued computer science because of the romanticized notation of tracking every bit and byte and talking directly to the hardware. I know I'm not alone given the popularity of old-school fantasy con…
> It saddens me to say but if I were starting over today I might not enter the field professionally. Most modern development is gluing components together and wrangling packages. It's so far removed from the machine and the distance is only growing. I don't know what's sadder: That this kind of programming is becoming a lost art, or that nobody seems to care. I got my first job out of college partially because in the…
I think there are real costs if the level of incompetence adds up over a stack/system. But as a general rule, I don't think this is a sad phenomenon at all. Well, actually, it's fair to feel sad about it, but it should be understood as a form of growth for our society. (Growth is often painful.)
Writing low-level code should be viewed like blacksmithing or any other technology. At one time, it was the cutting edge that enabled new tools to exist. But over time, it's become well understood and abstracted and it's possible for us to build factories that automatically output many of the steel products we need. And now we can mass-produce steel components for more advanced machines that would have been impossible if they had to be forged by hand.