Yes, there are some people who don’t know how some things work. The conclusion that the “future seems bleak” doesn’t actually follow, though. Perhaps the author was already pessimistic?
We have used too many levels of abstractions
221–230 of 564 posts
Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
With all due respect, this is some elitist nonsense. Sure, a frontend dev who strictly works on that won’t know much about, say, the OS layer. But they don’t have to, it’s not part of their job in any way. There is no shortage of young people that work on areas that makes them require deep knowledge of many different layers of the stack, it is simply not necessary for every IT-related job. But one can absolutely pick…
I once worked with a back-end dev who didn't know what RAM was. He knew C# and ASP.NET but couldn't point to RAM on a motherboard or explain what it really did. About all he could describe it as was "temporary storage". Their lack of basic knowledge of how computers work really showed in the crap code they wrote. It was no wonder it was their code that ate up all the RAM on the server because they never put much thought into the hardware it was running on. I know this is anecdotal, but there are plenty of devs just like this out there.
Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions
#223Earlier 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…
Since you’re citing fiction, have you read the foundation series? The original inspiration for that book was The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which is a history book (arguably the first modern history book).
Anyways, that just to say that people in post-Roman Empire Europe lived out the reality of lost knowledge. They lived with the remains of incredible art, architecture like the coliseum, public works like the aqueduct, etc. But they wouldn’t have known how to reproduce those works. How to make concrete, etc. was knowledge that was lost to them.
Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions
#224Earlier 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.
I guess in IT it's the other way around, where you can start with advanced abstractions and frameworks without bothering what kind of rabbit hole is underneath (at least while it's going smooth), it gets deeper as you go closer to the hardware. While in maths you need to understand the basics to even know what's going on with more advanced areas. And this already applies to the fundamentals too, where in school it's…
No, you can do the same in math. It just means ignoring the proofs and just using the theorems as they are. However sometimes the application and proof requires similar ways of thinking, and you kind of miss out by skipping the proof. But the same can be occasionally true for software engineering.
Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions
#225This situation was predicted in a sci-fi short-story that I read a very long time ago. Unfortunately I cannot remember the title nor the author.
It makes me wonder if we are a hitting a pyramid depth in tech that exceeds a practical limit for the human mind and life-span.
One solution is to get a better mind. Interesting coincidence that there are few in the works...
Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 situa…
> Do you have any ressources to share ?
Godbolt [0] is an invaluable resource. But simply setting up tasks to yourself and completing them may be the best course of action. Then you'll find whatever resource you need for a concrete objective.
For example, if you have a week, I'd suggest to start "in the middle", and move up and down according to your tastes.
- Write a hello world program in C, compile it and run it. Try to compile it statically and understand the difference.
- Ask the compiler to produce an assembly file. Try to build the executable from that assembly.
- Try to write a hello world in assembly language by yourself, compile and run it.
- Write a program in assembly that prints fibonacci, or prime numbers.
- Now, forget about assembly and move upwards. Download python source code, compile it, and run a python hello world with that interpreter.
- Look at the Python source code, which is written in C, and try to follow what happens when you run your hello world.
- Try to change the "print" function of the python interpreter so that it prints your string backwards.
Depending on your experience, you may need more than a week (5 days) to complete all these steps. But that's OK! In a few months you can find a new spare week and continue your work.
Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions
#227The 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…
Most likely, your framework Is productive for you not because it’s the best framework available, but because you wrote it and know the ins and outs of it and it matches up to how you think. This isn’t too day it’s not likely better than other frameworks in at least some ways, but familiarity begets expertise which begets productivity. Many experts in drywall installation before drywall screws were popularized swear t…
There is an element of truth to that, especially as I was building the SDK, it helped me a lot that I knew how all the parts worked and could make everything fit together into a cohesive whole. Though now that it's done, I think you don't need much knowledge to use it. Will be interesting to see how other people react to it as it's geared towards designers and junior devs who only know HTML, CSS and basic JS.
Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions
#228Old man yelling at cloud vibes.
Yes some people are experts and some are just adequate. Nothing new here. Not everyone can be a messiah like the author, who spends half of this short essay telling us how great he is.
This article has almost nothing to do with abstraction. The author loses interest in his own thesis after the first two paragraphs.
Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
With all due respect, this is some elitist nonsense. Sure, a frontend dev who strictly works on that won’t know much about, say, the OS layer. But they don’t have to, it’s not part of their job in any way. There is no shortage of young people that work on areas that makes them require deep knowledge of many different layers of the stack, it is simply not necessary for every IT-related job. But one can absolutely pick…
> Sure, a frontend dev who strictly works on that won’t know much about, say, the OS layer. But they don’t have to, it’s not part of their job in any way.
The HTTP protocol, HTML and vanilla JS are not "the OS layer", and yes, it's part of your job as a web developer to at least understand the basics of them. There are many so-called "frontend devs" nowadays who literally only know React, and if you asked them to create a basic webpage where clicking a button changes some text in an element without React, they'd be completely lost.
Usually the problem with this kind of developer is not just that they don't know, it's that they don't care. They WILL inevitably run into problems that require this basic knowledge to solve because the frameworks can only hold your hand so far, and instead of trying to figure out what's going on under the hood that's causing their issue, they will instead shrug and go "it's not part of my job" and just write a bunch of garbage spaghetti code in an attempt to work around the issue.
Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Analogue electronics design has been almost entirely replaced by digital micro-controllers to the point that finding old-school electrical engineers that can design non-digital circuits is becoming a challenge.
Is this really true? Many aspects of analogue design are still relevant imo. Actual IC design (VLSI etc) is still a purely analogue field and all digital technology is fundamentally analogue at its core.
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