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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

#311

Post by EvanAnderson »

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…

Same thing in the retrocomputing community. The video series Usagi Electric did with the Centurion minicomputer is a good example. The degree to which data about even off the shelf parts have been lost to time is frightening, let alone software.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#312

Post by steveBK123 »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #202
devjab wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re managers and tech leads then why aren’t you making sure the people you’re supposed to lead obtain the understanding? We work with both high and low level tools where I work, and in my experience there isn’t necessarily a lack of understanding among younger developers. The CS courses still teach you a lot of the basics, and to actually use what you call “hype” tools efficiently you typically need a rather go…

> We don’t need our software developers to know how our Cloud Networking and Virtual Networking works, we don’t need them to spin up resources and make various internal DNS and Firewall rules, we simply need them to focus on what they’re good at and then hand off the container to the operations department where people actually specialise in that knowledge. I am afraid that many businesses prefer the vision where the…

Agree that devs not needing to know this is how things should be, and that CTO/tech management however is not acting this way.

It is basically idiotic to me, as a highly paid senior application dev.. that they basically want me to spend any cycles on stuff that would ordinarily be done by someone making 1/5th my TC.

If I can do it more than 5x as fast/efficiently, sure, but I don't. IaC is something I worry about at the start of a project, as hamfistedly as possible, probably over-provisioning so I don't have to go back to it anytime soon. All so I can move onto what I am paid to do - delivering functionality to stakeholders. Someone who deals with IaC as part of their full-time job will be the expert who can move more quickly & correctly through it.

Sometimes this is just galaxy brain budget arb, where the infra org gets to show a cost save, to the detriment of the appdev org.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#313

Post by charles_f »

> The developers knew how to put together a website and an API using a "modern framework", but did not understand much of the coding of the framework itself

This example sounds like a bad choice of framework, or insufficiently skilled devs.

I don't think the problem is that we have too many abstractions. Abstractions are useful, they allow people to focus on where they are different, avoid wasteful duplication of effort (when done right), and compensate for the non omniscence of everyone. They come with a cost, you need to know it.

There's a clear tendency to just buy into new trends, anf that's always been the case. Maybe the smaller scale of the industry back then made trends smaller and the choice more limited.

I think there's clearly an issue with the lack of interest to understand what's under the abstractions. Is it training, habit, culture, a change of who is a developer today? Don't know.

It was also much harder to be a dev 15 or 20y ago without having to know at least some C and some system. Stuff seemed more brittle as well so you had to fiddle. Deployment was mostly manual and artisanal so you had to copy files over manually, run commands, shit like that. Honestly the piece of mind and safety that frequent deliveries and "devops" brought is so good that I'd find it comical if anyone would suggest to me to go back.

So I don't think there's really too many abstractions. I think that sometimes they're the wrong choices, and sometimes people don't care enough about what's under their immediate interface

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#314

Post by pier25 »

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'…

What are you using server side?

I've been looking outside the JS world for an alternative for doing full stack dev and Laravel Livewire seems like an amazing alternative for like 80-90% of use cases. Something like Alpine, vanilla, or even Lit for the more sophisticated interactions.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#315

Post by lolinder »

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…

An important thing to remember is that not only did you get to watch the layers be added, you also have decades of experience. In today's field, where we double in number every N years, that's enough time to accumulate enough knowledge to feel like a demigod—to have more than 20 years of experience is extremely rare in the industry right now. That won't always be the case: eventually we'll stop growing exponentially and we'll find an equilibrium, and eventually the people with 30 years of experience will stop being a vanishingly small minority. While that may not give us the kind of breadth that your generation has, I would expect many of them to be able to master the specific slice of the tech tree that they actually build on top of.

30 years is plenty of time to learn the everything from the browser down to the CPU, or the HTTP framework down, or the database down, and probably enough to learn two such slices. Part of why it seems impossible now is just because most developers not only don't have the historical context, they haven't yet had any time.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#316

Post by Kamq »

johnklos wrote: post #293

As a systems administrator who has been doing this for a while, I can attest to this becoming more and more of a problem. I've worked with CUDA programmers who weren't aware of what "architecture" means in the context of computing until I asked them to consider running binary code meant for NVIDIA on AMD GPUs. I've worked with network administrators who couldn't conceive of the simple math behind something like singl…

> and just as in the audiophile world where there's a huge amount of money and energy spent to try to convince people that pricey bits are somehow better than cheap bits

I always assumed this came down to the analog part (usually some sort of speaker) being better, and all the extras on the cords were really just there because a cheap looking cord would ruin the aesthetic they're going for.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#317

Post by kobalsky »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #310

We’re going to be so fucked when the people who develop things like the linux kernel die. There are no upcoming people with that level of knowledge.

this kind of alarmism is ridiculous.

the new layers of abstraction have not made programmers dumber, they have added more programmers to the stack.

we still have and will have people designing kernels and CPUs for fun.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#319

Post by Const-me »

snakey wrote: post #261
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…

I agree about the high barrier to entry, but I disagree about the modern job market.

There’re huge areas of the software industry where performance matters to this day. Examples include videogames, content creation, video processing, engineering software, science related HPC, and now AI.

However, transitioning from web development to these areas gonna be hard. That software doesn’t run in web browsers, the code is either desktop apps, deep inside web backends, or supercomputer programs. And high-performance C++ is often not enough for them, depending on the area ideally you might also need GPU graphics and/or GPGPU compute.

I was lucky I have never worked on web apps. I know TCP/IP reasonably well, I have some general understanding of HTTP and HTML, but I’m totally clueless about the modern frontend technologies.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#320

Post by iforgotpassword »

flatline wrote: post #294
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 have worked with interns and young devs just out of school who are sharp as tacks. I had an intern a few years ago, the first task we paired on was to figure out why our MySql connections from Qt were misbehaving. We stepped through the application code, the Qt code, found where it was failing, and ended up backporting a Qt patch from upstream to fix it. Yes, I gave him some guidance, but once he caught on he was a…

That's one in a hundred CS majors today in my experience.
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