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We have used too many levels of abstractions

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Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#261

Post by snakey »

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…

Excellent point. Giving my perspective as a relative newbie (~5 years) to the industry with no comp. sci. background.

It was around the year 3-4 mark that I decided to knuckle down and try to improve my fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, memory models, concurrency, CPU architecture and some network fundamentals) by reading popular papers and literature and writing all of my personal projects in C and C++. I’m about two years into this study and while it’s been immensely rewarding, I’ve found it to be a huge undertaking while juggling life and a full-time job.

What I’ve also noticed is that, while I understand a lot more about what the CPU is doing, memory manipulation and how to write more efficient programs, I haven’t found it be particularly beneficial to my daily work (still Python and JS). I would love to be able to put these concepts into practice for many hours of my working day but it’s difficult to move from general web-stack development to more performance-oriented development (embedded, low-latency, OS, etc.).

My guess is that this is one of the reasons we have ended up in this situation. You can get away without knowing the fundamentals (a good sign of progress?) and that if you really do want to pursue these areas that promote building this kind of knowledge as part of your career, the barrier to entry is quite high and the positions are fewer than say a decade or two ago. I find it a shame because in my eyes, these areas are the most interesting and exciting areas of programming. It’s an art.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#262

Post by graypegg »

Kids today don't get enough credit. A friend's son was so excited to show off the Roblox game him and his friends were making a couple of weeks ago. Was there for (Canadian) thanksgiving so there was some family friends and tons of people from his family there. He had already picked out something he thought each of us would be interested about it, and I was the "show him the Lua!" guy!

People assume that because their phone/laptop is locked down and unable to spark curiosity that it must be the same for kids today, but I think they just become a little more un-curious themselves.

Yeah it's built on some abstractions, but I do think there's some valleys among the tall abstraction mountains that the curious few venture into, just as it's always been.

Yes, c64 BASIC lets you POKE at any memory address you want, but I was getting a pitch about a complex 3D collect-a-thon with FPS elements, from a 10 year old. That's also kind of cool.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#263

Post by bloomingeek »

maxrecursion wrote: post #209
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…

"But there will be a point in time when we will go on retirement and there will be only precious few people who had perseverance to really understand all those things by diving into obscure, historical manuals." I just hope when that time comes I'm well compensated for studying erudite texts on low level computer science while chilling on my phone instead of browsing social media or playing games. But honestly, I enj…

Although I worked with computers most of my career, it wasn't in the tech sphere at all. The article meant a lot to me because of trying to wade through tons of websites for info about signing up for SS and Medicare. These sites were not set up for non-computer tech people.

Like you, I enjoy learning techie stuff, but most of my friends don't. Because, IMO, most websites are written for younger people, they feel almost helpless.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#264

Post by jtuente »

devonkim wrote: post #255
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #109

Earlier 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…

I don’t understand how front end devs can get so far without learning how to use the developer tool console now standard in every major browser. How can one not learn about a POST vs GET when things like request caching and back button complications are a reality? I hit these issues as a senior backend dev fumbling around with front end so many years ago so I have a hard time understanding how that isn’t even close t…

Too much trial and error and throwing everything they know at it until it gets close enough to the desired look. I have one co-worker that has taken off after I showed him how to use dev tools and another that's still trying to guess their way through the problem after showing them how to use dev tools.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#266

Post by wcoenen »

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?

The Antikythera mechanism comes to mind. It dates to the 2nd century BC. Nothing like it was constructed afterwards, until the 14th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#267

Post by MSFT_Edging »

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…

> Nowadays I happily patch nginx source code and compile it manually, but it took a lot of work to learn a minuscule chunk of what all those guys knew by heart.

I'm about half a decade into my career and I've recently tried to take note when I hit milestones or achievements, even little ones.

I was helping an intern with a tool and it didn't have support for what we needed it for. Since the tool was open source, I just cloned it and patched it to add support for what we needed. When I told the intern this, he couldn't comprehend that I was so blase about modifying this tool that seems like witchcraft to him.

But what I quoted, I feel deeply. I've worked with so many people with so much knowledge they can't possibly communicate it, and I'm only starting to really understand the tech around me. I didn't think anything of patching the tool at the time, but its important I look back so that the younger version of me can see the progress I've made.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#268

Post by spicyjpeg »

lordfrito wrote: post #215
EvanAnderson wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will be an increasingly important history component in comp sci., software engineering, infosec, and associated fields. I think this is a place where the IT field has done a bad job and, as a result, we've had unbelievable amounts of "wheel reinvention". I'd love to hear from somebody with experience in scientific or other disciplines and IT who could contrast their fields with ours. I only know that I have had…

> Vernor Vinge was right, though-- software (and hardware) archaeologist will be a real job. Spend some time in the coin op game community... This is all we spend our time on. Well that and cabinet repair. But seriously though, keeping these old games alive requires serious reverse engineering of both hardware and software. Especially if they have custom chips, ASICs, undocumented features, etc. But the work has to b…

Having been working on writing documentation, tools and homebrew SDKs for arguably one of the most influential arcade systems ever made [1], I could not agree more with this. Hardware and software gets left behind by the original developers all the time, but that in no way makes it no longer relevant - and it certainly does not make the underlying concepts outdated. Z80 or 68000 assembly language might be completely useless to a web developer, but shall we call it "obsolete" when there are millions of these processors still around running critical infrastructure? Shall we really claim that learning to manage memory manually is futile since GC languages exist?

Besides, the PlayStation based hardware of this specific arcade PCB is not that far off from the ubiquitous 32-bit microcontrollers that underpin modern digital society; in fact the MIPS R3000 derived instruction set even bears a striking resemblance to that newfangled RISC-V thing every investor is talking about. And yet most of my 19-year-old university classmates want to stay away from "scary" embedded or kernel work in favor of web or game development.

[1] https://psx-spx.consoledev.net/konamisystem573/

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#269

Post by dclowd9901 »

MyFirstSass wrote: post #236

As a 15+ years webdev my recent projects in the front-end are almost pure "vanilla JS" (Just JS) + Html, and CSS with only Petite Vue / Alpine on top. I find the modern Vue, React etc. stacks absolutely insufferably complex and prone to breaking in 1000 places each time you upgrade some package, or change som random thing in the already stupidly complex "Tooling/Build" chains people are setting up by default. And it'…

12 yr FE dev here, and I’m a big fan of static site again, when possible. Who needs SPA when your round trip cost requires no JS eval or boot time? I wrote this library that is intended for somewhat tech savvy folks to easily generate static sites using AWS: https://github.com/dclowd9901/posse

I agree: building sites like that brings the fun back to web development in a big way.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#270

Post by corndoge »

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 sounds plausible but I don't think it's correct. The body of knowledge you refer to is large but not that large. I think by the time a teenager with a persistent interest in computers is 25 or so they can accumulate a similar level of expertise, and without no lifing it.
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