Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We have used too many levels of abstractions

unixsheikh.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 564 posts

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#331

Post by tight-ship »

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…

Road workers laying out asphalt don't start from chemistry first principles either.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#332

Post by bbarn »

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…

I think you may be confusing what you see with the cause.

For example: You and I HAD to be willing to go through that, and we were fascinated by it. There are still plenty of great FE and BE young devs who see something and instantly ask "How does this work" and keep going down. The difference is, most people in employment don't HAVE to do this like all people in our early career did. If those shortcuts to getting paid existed in our early careers, many of us would have taken the money and not cared. It's not an experience or a "You had to be there" thing, it's simple curiosity and motivation that sets people apart in this regard.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#333

Post by steve_adams_86 »

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…

I’ve worked with around a dozen interns/co-ops, and only 2 stood out to me. The rest often made me wonder if they could reasonably handle this kind of career. I hope they could!

It’s tough if you feel a degree of responsibility for their success. Mentors are one of your greatest assets early on (and arguably later as well), and to try hard to have them succeed and thrive only to see them languish on trivial tasks is awful.

I think part of the problem is that CS education where I live is awful. The kids come out of school expecting real work to be wildly different than it is, and it hits them like a brick wall.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#334

Post by brandall10 »

intothemild wrote: post #158
criddell wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn’t agree more and it’s something I didn’t understand at all until my final year at university. I was talking with one of my professors and complained about having to learn and use SML and Eiffel for some projects when in the real world , I’d be using something like C (this was 1994). He asked me if I was there for an education or training. I think today it’s probably more true than ever. Schools are under pre…

I completely agree here. The problem was that there was a shortage of developers, and that most universities still only had CompSci degrees, not Software Engineering degrees, coupled with those degrees were 3-4 years long... So enter the code bootcamp, where you're basically given a hammer, and taught that every problem can be solved with it.. Now those bootcamps aren't all like this, and there were and are good ones…

"and that most universities still only had CompSci degrees, not Software Engineering degrees"

Is a Software Engineering degree really a thing? Perhaps outside the US? Can you point to a notable university that has this major? A quick search gives me the impression this is an online correspondence program type of thing.

At UCSD in the late 90s we had a Software Engineering class but that was it. Otherwise internships were supposed to prepare you for your careeer.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#336

Post by [deleted] »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #178
MonadIsPronad wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Knowing what the foundations are that the edifice you've constructed sits upon allows you to affect repairs when it crumbles unexpectedly. Finally get to use this bit of knowledge: 'effect' (the verb) was the word you wanted there.

Thanks! That one frequently trips me up. If I think about it for a moment I know "his affect" is different than "the effect something has", but, as is sadly and normally the case, I power thru writing w/o thinking as much as I should.

[deleted]

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#337

Post by emptysongglass »

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…

Your articles are so helpful: great Python guidance and now HTMX? What's next, React frameworks? ;)

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#338

Post by meiraleal »

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…

> I started to write an HTMX tutorial (https://www.bitecode.dev/p/a-little-taste-of-htmx-part-1) because I noticed a lot of young coders don't understand what to do with it. They read the tweets saying it's nice, but when they look at it, it makes no sense to them.

I agree with you but HTMX? That's a big abstraction layer. A good one but still, not really a way to avoid layers of abstraction. Pure JS makes more sense.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#339

Post by rr808 »

I'm working on a team with very naive, young, non-technically trained programmers. I love it so much. Start a program, open a file, process the file one step at a time. No DI, not much unit testing, no fancy frameworks or language features. Its so refreshing to just work on adding business functionality and just testing it with users.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#340

Post by sgarland »

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…

What I’ve found most helpful for understanding how something affects Python specifically (but this holds true for nearly any language) is godbolt [0].

Find a chunk of code you want to optimize, simplify it as much as possible, then put it into godbolt. Match the interpreter version to yours. Then go look up the bytecodes and see what they do. Try changing the Python version to see how it differs, or a different approach to the problem (e.g. a map instead of a list comprehension).

This takes an enormous amount of time, of course, but you can learn quite a bit.

[0]: https://godbolt.org

Post reply on HN