Computer science as a lost art (2015)

I think the best way to learn architecture is to try (and initially fail) to do some projects which make demands on your architecture abilities. I'd recommend writing some frameworks or engines (without worrying about fully completing and releasing them!). Where I learned the most about designing reusable systems was building a game engine, then actually building a game or two on it and seeing what was painful and what worked and taking notes, then building another engine based on my experience, and repeating. I built three engines by the end, and made maybe four or five (little) games off of them.

I never released any of them and none are useful for anything any longer. None probably reached more than 75% completeness. But by trying to build games on them I saw with such clarity things that worked and didn't, and I got deep practicing in thinking about more 'general' forms/concepts/structures. I wrote a framework for writing 3D model loaders after, and the lessons carried over. I was utterly lost when starting the first game engine; with the model loading framework I had to think deeply, but I new where I was going.

Here's something to consider. If you try to just start writing 'a game engine,' (or whatever engine/framework) that could mean about anything (from 1 day of work, to 20 years of work). But, if you consider some concrete ideas for particular games you'd like to make, think about what they have in common, and then try writing a piece of software that takes care of the common parts, you'll have constrained the problem to something workable with definite goals, and a way of testing your success after.

This is at the heart of any sort of 'abstraction' you develop: you want to code several things which have a bunch of overlapping aspects, so you write something that captures the common parts, and then arrive at the several things you actually need by instantiating your abstraction with different parameters (I mean that in a very general sense, not with specific reference to OOP, though it provides means of instantiating abstractions with various parameters too, of course).

I'd say being able to do the above effectively is the cornerstone of being able to do architecture well. A bunch of other stuff comes after, like knowing when to not create abstractions, and all sorts of knowledge about doing things well for systems in particular domains (e.g. architecture for an interactive 3d simulation vs. web apps have very different patterns that have surfaced as effective).

Akwardly, i agree on the facts but the sentence doesn't feel right. Would you agree with this rephrasing: asm is simple in terms of number of abstract concepts needed to define its syntax and semantics (and as far as i know this is good since it's intended as a mother-of-all lingua franca), but of course every language out there is turing complete (and has some mechanism for syscalls); so in the end the only way to build haskell-like abstractions in asm is actually to code up GHC and then code in haskell. Which i wouldn't call at all programming in asm (just like i'm not commuting circuits by typing on this keyboard). Nor do i think this is actually what asm is used for (when written by humans). My guess is that asm is used for programming close to the metal--crucial parts of firmwares, drivers--in situations with simple logic and in which abstraction would actually get in your way (who care about types or functions when you just need to write some values into some memory location).

As a person who never had a degree but whose knowledge goes above and beyond what 90% of the market needs and well into CS territory, this article insults me. It's also a painful reminder of similar prejudices in people who are looking to hire. I often end up doing the kind of basic development the author talks about and I'm not happy about that.

Why not just take a CS degree? Because I'm a poor fit for the education system. That's why I dropped out of high school in the first place.

Also, I feel like I've paid my dues already. I've been learning about computer software (and hardware and electronics) for 27 years. I haven't stopped at merely what I needed to know to do my job. I have done a lot of self-study. I routinely roll my own libraries and write embedded code, and I had a patch submitted to the Linux kernel a few years back. I also design analog and digital circuits on my spare time.

I feel it's not about having a degree at all, because I'm living, breathing evidence of that. I've met people with CS degrees who can barely write a line of code. Maybe they didn't go to a good college. Maybe they did, and it's possible to pass the exams by cramming (followed by forgetting).

Saying that you can't do advanced stuff without a CS degree is snobbery.

Ugh.

I think what people writing articles like this tend to miss, is that it's much easier to be super deep in a field when the field is limited and low-entry but you're already in it. Because there's not really as much going on and there's not much else to do but learn C or some text editor on a super deep level or what not. What else are you going to do? Look at the stuff "deep" people are generally into, it mostly revolves around POSIX some way or another. And databases, but nobody wants to talk about that.

But today, there are hundreds of languages, a whole bunch of frameworks per language, various tools, constantly changing standards, etc. The available landscape is absolutely staggering. If you want to deeply focus, you need to pick what to deeply focus on, which is a rather tough choice and a questionable one, because the thing you focused on might become obsolete.

> if you want to make a tiny little difference in the industry and change the world just a little bit, then you do need that degree

And what sense does THIS make? Among the people who I know who _do_ deeply get into some specific CS topic, many are those who do not have degrees, because they're often people who are not fans of structure and ended up doing what they want, as opposed to what might be beneficial for career purposes.

This just seems to be heavily misguided elitism.

If you really want to know why the quality of software, and basically everything else, has gone down, just look at market incentives and you'll find that to be an utterly boring question.

> If you want to make really interesting exciting things that have never existed before, if you want to make a tiny little difference in the industry and change the world just a little bit, then you do need that degree. If you want to make the tools and libraries that the lower-level people use, you do need that degree.

I wonder if the author considers Node.js to be really interesting and exciting and never existed before. Ryan Dahl doesn't have a CS degree (but does have a mathematics degree).

Another (pretty cliché) example: Bill Gates never finished his degree and went on to create many great, exciting and interesting things.