I think the people that first encountered computers when they were relatively simple and constrained have a huge advantage over the rest of us I don't and I gr

I think the people that first encountered computers when they were relatively simple and constrained have a huge advantage over the rest of us I don't and I grew up in the era of 8 bit machines and kilobytes of RAM etc. I fully recognize that it was fun to have those constraints and we learnt a lot about dealing with them (using less memory, using fewer instructions) but I don't buy that that really matters for most programmers today. They'll have other things to worry about: e.g. debugging distributed programs. Sure, if you want to do microcontroller work then that sort of thing is useful, but literally nothing stops a "Full Stack" programmer picking up an Arduino and programming it and learning something new. I love playing with those environments (http://blog.jgc.org/2009/08/just-give-me-simple-cpu-and-few-io.html http://blog.jgc.org/2009/08/just-give-me-simple-cpu-and-few-...) but every day I see people with different experience of computing from me and I don't feel that I have an advantage over them: they often know about things I'm totally ignorant of. It's true that I'm very good at debugging horrible low level things, but it's also true that I'm not good at imagining the state of a system with hundreds of micro-services.