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We have used too many levels of abstractions

unixsheikh.com

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Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#111

Post by preommr »

These abstractions also exist to fill the void of an ever creasong job-sector.

I sometimes feel like there are multiple specialties (for which different roles, and often different people are required) where someone only has to work for way less than full-time (maybe even as low as 5% of the time). When we hire specialized people, they do the needed 5% and then have to find additional work to do to fill in the time. So we get more complex tools that incremental improvements, we get more abstractions, we get more overall complexity.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#112

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

jongjong wrote: post #98

The other thing is that we've adopted the wrong abstractions on many occasions. Today, in the software industry, we have an arrogant mono-culture which believes that we're at the end of history and have figured it all out... But in fact, I believe we've gone down the wrong path with many more recent tech. I feel like everything was moving on the right direction until around 2014... Then it's like progress started goi…

> Companies started forcing everyone to use these frameworks

Companies are made of people who, hopefully, have people in decision making roles who have context and the knowledge to make the right decisions. There are reasons why we use "these frameworks" (be it frontend or backend). You may not like the reasons but corporate programming isn't just about language purity but what makes the company money, of which there are a lot of factors like hire-ability, maintainability, continuity, etc.

What happens when your company uses your bespoke SDK and you leave? You may think its easy to teach someone else how to use it but there's a lot more that goes into how companies make technology decisions.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#113

Post by djur »

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #12

I think there is one interesting angle to this problem. I am someone who grew up with the technology, as the levels of abstractions were being added. I am now benefiting from all those accumulated decades of knowledge. As the IT / development world was changing, I had enormous privilege and comfort to learn the things at the pace they were happening. Being able to assimilate changes over long decades. Be a witness to…

This is not consistent with my experience with younger devs. There are teenagers doing kernel-level hacking and there's also older people who have been comfortably driving RAD tools for decades. This is fine. Software development has been gradually specializing and it will continue to do so. The tools and resources available for people who want to pursue low-level engineering are better, cheaper, and more accessible than ever.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#114

Post by tommybu »

jongjong wrote: post #98

The other thing is that we've adopted the wrong abstractions on many occasions. Today, in the software industry, we have an arrogant mono-culture which believes that we're at the end of history and have figured it all out... But in fact, I believe we've gone down the wrong path with many more recent tech. I feel like everything was moving on the right direction until around 2014... Then it's like progress started goi…

I am curious about your SDK now. Do you host it publicly? If no, could you at least explain what is the difference between your method and mainstream frameworks?

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#115

Post by arnaudvalette »

enriquto wrote: post #47
onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #12

I think there is one interesting angle to this problem. I am someone who grew up with the technology, as the levels of abstractions were being added. I am now benefiting from all those accumulated decades of knowledge. As the IT / development world was changing, I had enormous privilege and comfort to learn the things at the pace they were happening. Being able to assimilate changes over long decades. Be a witness to…

> spending a decade working with a low level programming language before you jump into high level programming language is simply not an option. Nobody said that. But spending a week is definitely an option to all programmers, and many would benefit from it.

Do you have any ressources to share ? I am a self taught developer, I do stuff at my level (typescript, lisp), also because when you work alone, such high level languages allow you to express things nicely and fast. I kinda know how a cpu works, I understand what is going on when you perform some bare metal programming, but I never barely went down the rabbit hole and performed some low level stuff. I'm in the situation where I don't know what I should learn to be on par with graduates/undergraduates students. I am searching ressources about networking, operating systems, or anything that could enhance my proximity with low level stuff.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#116

Post by everdrive »

bongobingo1 wrote: post #93
cjalmeida wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that advanced math has a similar problem, that some subjects are quite deep that only a handful of people really understand the topic and passing the knowledge down to younger mathematicians is not a given.

Are there good historical examples of this happening, where foundational knowledge is completely lost? I know I have read about it in books as a fiction, but I assume it must have already happened here before. Maybe its an oxymoronic question to ask, seeing as if its lost we might not even know its lost, but more in the vein of "We put the lime in the mortar because this is what we have always done", unaware of the a…

>Are there good historical examples of this happening, where foundational knowledge is completely lost?

Usually following the fall of empires. Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) wrote:

"Perhaps they have written exhaustively on this topic, and their work did not reach us. There are many sciences. There have been numerous sages among the nations of mankind. The knowledge that has not come down to us is larger than the knowledge that has. Where are the sciences of the Persians that ‘Umar ordered to be wiped out at the time of the conquest? Where are the sciences of the Chaladaeans, the Syrians and the Babylonians, and the scholarly products and results that were theirs? Where are the sciences of the Copts, their predecessors? The sciences of only one nation, the Greeks, have come down to us, because they were translated through Al-Ma’mun’s efforts. He was successful in this direction because he had many translators at his disposal and spent much money in this connection."

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#117

Post by tgv »

chilmers wrote: post #61
onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #12

I think there is one interesting angle to this problem. I am someone who grew up with the technology, as the levels of abstractions were being added. I am now benefiting from all those accumulated decades of knowledge. As the IT / development world was changing, I had enormous privilege and comfort to learn the things at the pace they were happening. Being able to assimilate changes over long decades. Be a witness to…

Unless you're two hundred years old, you joined the development of this technology in the middle. There was already decades of progress in electronics and telecommunications theory and engineering that everything you listed was built on top of. Your predecessors likely thought it was all newfangled abstractions that obscured more fundamental knowledge, and your successors will think the same about whatever world they…

That's the kind of argumentation the article argues against. There's a middle ground. Or, if you prefer, there's an optimum somewhere, and right now, we're on a descending slope.

To build mobile phones, we need a lot of tech built on tech build on tech. Dwarfs on giant's shoulders. And there's a place for people who don't understand the underlying tech. I've got a colleague who doesn't understand any of it, yet can do useful frontend work. But when you stand too high above the ground, the problems in the article become real, and that will get us stuck.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#118

Post by kazen44 »

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #25
beretguy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will always be hyper-nerds and just super smart people who will study all of the low level stuff. Granted, they will be vastly outnumbered by high level programmers.

That's what I mean by "precious few". I am continuously hiring new people, mostly senior devs and tech leads. Maybe one in a hundred has any understanding of what virtual memory is. Or why one process can't access memory of another process and, if you really want it, how to set it up. Two decades ago that was common knowledge. It went away just as the knowledge of how networking works. Currently, if they try to open…

>It went away just as the knowledge of how networking works. Currently, if they try to open a connection and it does not work they are pretty much at a complete loss to what happened, where and how to fix it

also, devs seem to not understand that a computer network is basically a massive distributed system (on the routing level anyways), and that things inside this system can and do fail nearly constantly.

things like latency, endpoint connectivity and available bandwith is not a fixed given!.

So many devs in my experience seem to write code which assumes the network is always available with the same characteristics as the point in time in which they wrote the software.

Not to even mention devs are even entire companies building HA mechanisms which rely on ethernet connectivity to work, making it very hard if not impossible to stretch them properly across network segments/locations without stretching ethernet. (which brings its own set of problems).

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#119

Post by mattgreenrocks »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #29

> Question everything. Especially things that don't make any sense to you. Don't just assume that someone else knows better - that's how you quickly turn into a blind follower. That’s what I do by default since I was a kid, and I can tell you the social pressure not to is significant. I recall an interview I did once, and one reason I failed it was "questioning everything". It didn’t even felt like it, I was just ask…

Subconsciously, I think some people know their system designs can’t hold up to sustained scrutiny. And their technical aesthetic is weak, oftentimes it is a mental symlink to “best practices” and “what HN/X says.” So talking about the way it has grown, and the why, can provoke anxiety.

So you end up in this weird place where it feels like there is a big pull to make tech about everything but the mechanics of what you actually do on a day to day basis. Or rather, it’s viewed in a very transactional way: “I learn this skill to get that job.”

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#120

Post by ksec »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #109
onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #12

I think there is one interesting angle to this problem. I am someone who grew up with the technology, as the levels of abstractions were being added. I am now benefiting from all those accumulated decades of knowledge. As the IT / development world was changing, I had enormous privilege and comfort to learn the things at the pace they were happening. Being able to assimilate changes over long decades. Be a witness to…

You can actually see this with new frontend devs. They know only full SPA frameworks, they have never seen a dump of an HTTP message, headers and verbs are abstract things to them. Hell, many of them don't know you can have fully functional websites with zero JS, including payment, video, login, etc. I started to write an HTMX tutorial ( https://www.bitecode.dev/p/a-little-taste-of-htmx-part-1 ) because I noticed a l…

>You can actually see this with new frontend devs. They know only full SPA frameworks, ......

Around I guess 2017 or even 2016? I used to think this is some sort internet troll comment about people never seen a dump of an HTTP message, until......

>Because they started with assembly.

It wasn't necessary starting with assembly or something low level. ( Although that certainly helped ) We have less entertainment, more time, and no Internet ( for most part ). Things also dont work all the time. And we have to spend time figuring it out ourselves. That is where all the knowledge comes from.

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