4 ms·

I actually disagree with this. I came to computing from the reverse direction (I did theoretical math in grad school and then steadily needed to become better a

by p4wnc6 11y ago

I actually disagree with this. I came to computing from the reverse direction (I did theoretical math in grad school and then steadily needed to become better at programming as I needed it in industrial jobs). At first I thought a lot of stuff classified as 'bullshittery' and that with convenience tools like MATLAB, most of it was obsolete and taking time away from focusing on the supposedly more fundamental "real work" of some domain science. But as I have gone down rabbit holes with Haskell, C, LLVM, and some other tools, I have discovered that seeing those 400 different implementations of basic data structures has been extremely helpful. Reading and re-reading decades-old tutorials on finer points of gdb and memory layout and books on what NUMA-aware memory architectures are like has been extremely educational and important. I would now regard MATLAB, and even the idea of wanting a prototyping platform like MATLAB, as bullshittery. I used to think that progress, so to speak, in computing was supposed to mean less and less need to be proficient with low-level tools, and a constant push to abstract away the low level and use languages or tools that offer the same things in a high level, black box manner. But I totally don't think this any more. Now I want to be a power user of all the low level things and I wish that the surface area of tech and science wasn't growing so fast that it forces me to be a wimpy abstraction user in a lot of domains that I don't have time for. Anyway, I'm just adding my perspective that the attitude that seemingly cumbersome low-level stuff that was formerly instructional but now abstracted is a nuisance is wrong. The world overall doesn't have nearly enough competent technicians and engineers who really know (intuition in the fingertips) that low level stuff, and we're allowing the superficial pleasantries of limiting abstractions to raise up generations of programmers who not only don't know this stuff at all, but also aren't even curious about how it works. They can do jobs when the black box abstractions are working, but as soon as something breaks, they don't know how to fix it. Maybe one way to say it is that we're breeding programmers who have shifted their curiosity away from how fundamental atomic parts aggregate to make functioning tools and towards how to permute a series of ready-made black box abstractions for some social-level end goal (e.g. how do I permute Heroku and Postgres and Spark ML to make a recommender system) -- but it's not actually clear to me that it's better in a utilitarian sense that we're supposedly "freed" from our low level chains to think about these one-level-up problems.

nostrademons 11y ago
I'm curious - what's your motivation for being interested in tech? Have you given some thought about what drives you? I've found, personally, that my motivation has changed fairly dramatically over the years, and with it, my perspective on high-level vs. low-level programming. When I was in high school and college, my motivation was that I wanted to feel competent - I wanted a skill that was all my own, that I could master without anyone telling me I had to. Immediately after college, through my first job & startup, my motivation was to get rich, or at least develop a financial position better than my peers. While I was at Google, my motivation was to earn the respect of my peers, and now that I'm out on my own trying out startup ideas, my motivation is to test my intuitions about the software industry. When I wanted to feel competent or earn the respect of my peers, I've usually gravitated toward low-level technologies and concepts, things that were hard conceptually or close to the machine but didn't have much practical application. Haskell, lambda calculus, compiler design, blazingly fast code, the bits & bytes of network protocols. When I wanted to get rich or test out my ideas, I've gravitated toward very high-abstraction, productivity-enhancing, flavor-of-the-month technologies. Javascript (in 2007, before it became hot), frontend dev, Polymer, React, native mobile development, Parse & Firebase, etc. I currently care very little about tech, because I've learned that in the grand scheme of things it will usually not make-or-break a business idea. When I read your post, I'm curious why you use terms like "wimpy abstraction user" or "superficial pleasantries" or "generations of programmers who not only don't know this stuff". That seems to imply that you don't respect these programmers. Why? Frontend devs frequently make more than backend devs, and have many more job opportunities to choose from. The people who make the most (founding CEOs) often have the wimpiest coding skills of all. What makes for a status hierarchy where the closer to the machine you are, the higher the status? Not saying it's wrong - I've certainly felt like this at times too. But given that I'm now in my "study reality and poke it in certain ways to see why it behaves like it does" phase, I'm curious. FWIW, paradoxically I've found that each time I've moved from a core motivation, it's because I've found that I can never achieve what was motivating me. So my "feel competent" phase ended when I started digging deeper into all the subfields of computer science and realized I could never master it all. My "get rich" phase ended when I realized that I already had enough and no matter how much money I earned, there would always be something else I might want, if I let myself. My "respect of my peers" phase ended when I realized that there will always be some people who liked you and some people who hated you and that which side they fell on depended more on how you treat them than on anything you accomplish yourself, so really all I needed was the respect of myself. Maybe the "test my intuitions" phase will end when I decide that no matter how much information I have or what I experience, there will always be an alternate explanation, but I suspect that will trigger an existential crisis that I'm not quite ready for. There's probably some brilliant Nietzschean revelation in there somewhere, but I'll settle for some observations on status & respect in programming communities. ;-)

by p4wnc6 11y ago

nostrademons 11y ago

I'm curious - what's your motivation for being interested in tech? Have you given some thought about what drives you? I've found, personally, that my motivation has changed fairly dramatically over the years, and with it, my perspective on high-level vs. low-level programming. When I was in high school and college, my motivation was that I wanted to feel competent - I wanted a skill that was all my own, that I could master without anyone telling me I had to. Immediately after college, through my first job & startup, my motivation was to get rich, or at least develop a financial position better than my peers. While I was at Google, my motivation was to earn the respect of my peers, and now that I'm out on my own trying out startup ideas, my motivation is to test my intuitions about the software industry. When I wanted to feel competent or earn the respect of my peers, I've usually gravitated toward low-level technologies and concepts, things that were hard conceptually or close to the machine but didn't have much practical application. Haskell, lambda calculus, compiler design, blazingly fast code, the bits & bytes of network protocols. When I wanted to get rich or test out my ideas, I've gravitated toward very high-abstraction, productivity-enhancing, flavor-of-the-month technologies. Javascript (in 2007, before it became hot), frontend dev, Polymer, React, native mobile development, Parse & Firebase, etc. I currently care very little about tech, because I've learned that in the grand scheme of things it will usually not make-or-break a business idea. When I read your post, I'm curious why you use terms like "wimpy abstraction user" or "superficial pleasantries" or "generations of programmers who not only don't know this stuff". That seems to imply that you don't respect these programmers. Why? Frontend devs frequently make more than backend devs, and have many more job opportunities to choose from. The people who make the most (founding CEOs) often have the wimpiest coding skills of all. What makes for a status hierarchy where the closer to the machine you are, the higher the status? Not saying it's wrong - I've certainly felt like this at times too. But given that I'm now in my "study reality and poke it in certain ways to see why it behaves like it does" phase, I'm curious. FWIW, paradoxically I've found that each time I've moved from a core motivation, it's because I've found that I can never achieve what was motivating me. So my "feel competent" phase ended when I started digging deeper into all the subfields of computer science and realized I could never master it all. My "get rich" phase ended when I realized that I already had enough and no matter how much money I earned, there would always be something else I might want, if I let myself. My "respect of my peers" phase ended when I realized that there will always be some people who liked you and some people who hated you and that which side they fell on depended more on how you treat them than on anything you accomplish yourself, so really all I needed was the respect of myself. Maybe the "test my intuitions" phase will end when I decide that no matter how much information I have or what I experience, there will always be an alternate explanation, but I suspect that will trigger an existential crisis that I'm not quite ready for. There's probably some brilliant Nietzschean revelation in there somewhere, but I'll settle for some observations on status & respect in programming communities. ;-)