3 ms·

One possible advantage is that it can be easier to learn the fundamentals when they aren't as obscured by as many later layers of smoothing over and/or complexi

by jerf 5y ago

One possible advantage is that it can be easier to learn the fundamentals when they aren't as obscured by as many later layers of smoothing over and/or complexity. For instance, it's very common for schools to teach assembler based on older tech, because it's simpler to deal with. Older tech will more directly expose you to the underlying issues with the foundations of the technology. For an example of something that smooths a lot of things over, using a nice, high-level USB library is abstracting away a huge amount of the issues involved with that sort of signaling. If you want to deeply understand how computers communicate with each other over wires, you're probably better off studying RS-232 first.

jdsully 5y ago
When I was first learning how to program I felt this way. High level languages were unsettling in that I knew they were doing a ton of "stuff" but I didn't know what. Old 8-bit micros get you closer to understanding how computers work.
WalterBright 5y ago
I tried to learn PDP-10 assembly language. I was just baffled by one concept after another (what's an accumulator? what's an addressing mode?). But then I did some programming for a 6800 with something like 40 simple instructions, and I "got it", and the -10 became simple, too.
- jerf 5y ago
  I've been doing web development since the late 1990s. I don't know every fiddly detail of every current web technology, but I can pretty much pick up any of them, read the docs for an hour, and have them going in just a bit more time, because I've got a solid foundation from working on things back when even XMLHTTPRequest was but a fever dream. I was recently speaking online to someone trying to get into it from a fresh start, and they lent me their perspective (kinda like a rubber duck debugging session), and I was a bit appalled at how hard it is to get into web development at this level now. I ended up recommending an approach in which one recapitulates the browser's development cycle if you want to really understand what's going on out there... it isn't the best choice technically in the short term because it's a long path to tread just to do "this one thing", but if you want to be similarly flexible and know how to work with the mess of technologies out there, for path-dependent and historically-contingent reasons (that is, opposed to any other good reasons), I think it may still be the best way to go. And to be honest, there's still a lot you can do with server-side generated HTML, the tags in modern HTML, and a bit of pure Javascript. There are good reasons to move beyond that; I don't mean that in a "back in my day" sort of way. But if you do start there, the rest of the stack makes a lot more sense than trying to start directly with React as your first intro to the web, as fine as React may be.
  - mumblemumble 5y ago
    I'm learning web dev right now, after not having really touched it since about the turn of the century. I bounced off of React & friends a few times before discovering the Lean Web movement. I'm genuinely happier for having found it. As a beginner, things like React and Elm feel opaque and obscenely complicated, all in order to solve problems that I don't actually have. Vanilla HTML+CSS+JS offers a much more pleasant learning curve, and has made it a fair bit easier to maintain momentum as I learn. From what I can tell, I'll probably also be able to take them really, really far before I need to adopt a front-end framework. I'm actually kind of wondering, now that I am more familiar with the history of the technology, if the continuing popularity of front-end frameworks is largely a hold-over from an earlier time when Web standards were weaker. Vanilla JavaScript and CSS have become a lot more capable over the past few years, but dropping back down to them may be technically or socially difficult. It's always easier to add more things to the pile than it is to take them away. Sunk costs and all that.
- m463 5y ago
  I learned pdp-11 assembler (in octal) and I think it is one of the most consistent/orthogonal instruction sets I've ever used. Maybe they cleaned up pdp-10? I'm not familiar with 6800, but I've heard people rave about 6809. I did do some 68000, and it was pretty good too. Oh, and IBM 370 type assembly is pretty interesting too, and very high level. for example, I think they could pretty much 1:1 map fortran statements to assembly statements. I also vividly recall the 4-register block move with pad - src addr, src len, dest addr, dest len, and pad was a high-order byte in one of them.

by jerf 5y ago

jdsully 5y ago

When I was first learning how to program I felt this way. High level languages were unsettling in that I knew they were doing a ton of "stuff" but I didn't know what. Old 8-bit micros get you closer to understanding how computers work.

WalterBright 5y ago

I tried to learn PDP-10 assembly language. I was just baffled by one concept after another (what's an accumulator? what's an addressing mode?). But then I did some programming for a 6800 with something like 40 simple instructions, and I "got it", and the -10 became simple, too.

jerf 5y ago
I've been doing web development since the late 1990s. I don't know every fiddly detail of every current web technology, but I can pretty much pick up any of them, read the docs for an hour, and have them going in just a bit more time, because I've got a solid foundation from working on things back when even XMLHTTPRequest was but a fever dream. I was recently speaking online to someone trying to get into it from a fresh start, and they lent me their perspective (kinda like a rubber duck debugging session), and I was a bit appalled at how hard it is to get into web development at this level now. I ended up recommending an approach in which one recapitulates the browser's development cycle if you want to really understand what's going on out there... it isn't the best choice technically in the short term because it's a long path to tread just to do "this one thing", but if you want to be similarly flexible and know how to work with the mess of technologies out there, for path-dependent and historically-contingent reasons (that is, opposed to any other good reasons), I think it may still be the best way to go. And to be honest, there's still a lot you can do with server-side generated HTML, the tags in modern HTML, and a bit of pure Javascript. There are good reasons to move beyond that; I don't mean that in a "back in my day" sort of way. But if you do start there, the rest of the stack makes a lot more sense than trying to start directly with React as your first intro to the web, as fine as React may be.
- mumblemumble 5y ago
  I'm learning web dev right now, after not having really touched it since about the turn of the century. I bounced off of React & friends a few times before discovering the Lean Web movement. I'm genuinely happier for having found it. As a beginner, things like React and Elm feel opaque and obscenely complicated, all in order to solve problems that I don't actually have. Vanilla HTML+CSS+JS offers a much more pleasant learning curve, and has made it a fair bit easier to maintain momentum as I learn. From what I can tell, I'll probably also be able to take them really, really far before I need to adopt a front-end framework. I'm actually kind of wondering, now that I am more familiar with the history of the technology, if the continuing popularity of front-end frameworks is largely a hold-over from an earlier time when Web standards were weaker. Vanilla JavaScript and CSS have become a lot more capable over the past few years, but dropping back down to them may be technically or socially difficult. It's always easier to add more things to the pile than it is to take them away. Sunk costs and all that.
m463 5y ago
I learned pdp-11 assembler (in octal) and I think it is one of the most consistent/orthogonal instruction sets I've ever used. Maybe they cleaned up pdp-10? I'm not familiar with 6800, but I've heard people rave about 6809. I did do some 68000, and it was pretty good too. Oh, and IBM 370 type assembly is pretty interesting too, and very high level. for example, I think they could pretty much 1:1 map fortran statements to assembly statements. I also vividly recall the 4-register block move with pad - src addr, src len, dest addr, dest len, and pad was a high-order byte in one of them.