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Don't let yourself get too cynical! Development is becoming more accessible, and this is skewing the ratio. I bet there are far more low level developers now t

Don't let yourself get too cynical! Development is becoming more accessible, and this is skewing the ratio. I bet there are far more low level developers now than 30 years ago, however.

baybal2 7y ago
> I bet there are far more low level developers now than 30 years ago, however. 30 years ago every developer at least knew how bits and bytes with logic operations work. Now, just any minimally proficient C/Cpp devs are genuinely hard to find. I may well say that there are less of them in total now. C development community shrank a lot over the years. Things went so bad that now some people suggest running whole web servers on MICROCONTROLLERS to just blink some LEDs!
- Klathmon 7y ago
  > Things went so bad that now some people suggest running whole web servers on MICROCONTROLLERS to just blink some LEDs! Why is that such a bad thing? Even microcontrollers are magnitudes more powerful than they were years ago, so why stick with other "simpler" methods when you can go with something more secure, easier to write and understand, and more "standard"? I'm one of those people running webservers on microcontrollers (you'll hate this, but I program my esp8266 controllers in JavaScript!), and it seems silly to lament that. They are cheap (about $3 a piece to my door), power efficient (battery life is measured in months for the battery powered devices), and all of my code is about a dozen lines of simple code that allows me to integrate with the rest of my system.
  - keepmesmall 7y ago
    Why save cycles today if you can borrow tomorrow?
- rsynnott 7y ago
  Visual Basic (where many people didn't really know what variables were) existed 28 years ago. And it wasn't the first thing like that, by any means. Even 50 years ago, well, things like COBOL and MUMPS were fairly divorced from the details.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  > C development community shrank a lot over the years. They're all in China and Korea churning out our cheap consumer hardware. Most IoT devices with embedded web servers are running on relatively modest processors. The main barrier to running an embedded networking stack is RAM and that is abundant enough in cheap micros to make it a non-issue.
- contingencies 7y ago
  Well, I have a whole startup whose flagship hardware is based on web servers on microcontrollers, and our build costs and iteration times are trivial compared to our competitors. Microcontrollers: cheap, reliable hardware. Web: cheap, reliable interface. Web programmers: cheap, numerous. What's not to love? You said yourself: minimally proficient C/Cpp devs are genuinely hard to find. HTTP GET with the program. ;)
  - baybal2 7y ago
    Oh no... Don't tell me you are also on this train... Seriously, you want your noodle vending machines to run a web server on an MCUs? I can't wait to see how eval escape will look on a vending machine. Well, at least now you know whom to call when they will break =D
    - contingencies 7y ago
      Heh, there's no way we'd expose that kind of interface, it's just internal plumbing. BTW we prefer the term service location to highlight the fact custom personalized meals are cooked direct from fresh ingredients within the machines, not simply 'dispensed' or 'vended' as "vending machines" as a concept has too many negative associations / too much cultural baggage.

Don't let yourself get too cynical! Development is becoming more accessible, and this is skewing the ratio. I bet there are far more low level developers now than 30 years ago, however.

baybal2 7y ago

> I bet there are far more low level developers now than 30 years ago, however. 30 years ago every developer at least knew how bits and bytes with logic operations work. Now, just any minimally proficient C/Cpp devs are genuinely hard to find. I may well say that there are less of them in total now. C development community shrank a lot over the years. Things went so bad that now some people suggest running whole web servers on MICROCONTROLLERS to just blink some LEDs!

Klathmon 7y ago
> Things went so bad that now some people suggest running whole web servers on MICROCONTROLLERS to just blink some LEDs! Why is that such a bad thing? Even microcontrollers are magnitudes more powerful than they were years ago, so why stick with other "simpler" methods when you can go with something more secure, easier to write and understand, and more "standard"? I'm one of those people running webservers on microcontrollers (you'll hate this, but I program my esp8266 controllers in JavaScript!), and it seems silly to lament that. They are cheap (about $3 a piece to my door), power efficient (battery life is measured in months for the battery powered devices), and all of my code is about a dozen lines of simple code that allows me to integrate with the rest of my system.
- keepmesmall 7y ago
  Why save cycles today if you can borrow tomorrow?
rsynnott 7y ago
Visual Basic (where many people didn't really know what variables were) existed 28 years ago. And it wasn't the first thing like that, by any means. Even 50 years ago, well, things like COBOL and MUMPS were fairly divorced from the details.
kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
> C development community shrank a lot over the years. They're all in China and Korea churning out our cheap consumer hardware. Most IoT devices with embedded web servers are running on relatively modest processors. The main barrier to running an embedded networking stack is RAM and that is abundant enough in cheap micros to make it a non-issue.
contingencies 7y ago
Well, I have a whole startup whose flagship hardware is based on web servers on microcontrollers, and our build costs and iteration times are trivial compared to our competitors. Microcontrollers: cheap, reliable hardware. Web: cheap, reliable interface. Web programmers: cheap, numerous. What's not to love? You said yourself: minimally proficient C/Cpp devs are genuinely hard to find. HTTP GET with the program. ;)
- baybal2 7y ago
  Oh no... Don't tell me you are also on this train... Seriously, you want your noodle vending machines to run a web server on an MCUs? I can't wait to see how eval escape will look on a vending machine. Well, at least now you know whom to call when they will break =D
  - contingencies 7y ago
    Heh, there's no way we'd expose that kind of interface, it's just internal plumbing. BTW we prefer the term service location to highlight the fact custom personalized meals are cooked direct from fresh ingredients within the machines, not simply 'dispensed' or 'vended' as "vending machines" as a concept has too many negative associations / too much cultural baggage.