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> [this] makes you dependent on the tools. Socrates had a similar opinion w/r/t reading and writing: > This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in th

> [this] makes you dependent on the tools. Socrates had a similar opinion w/r/t reading and writing: > This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. I feel like you and Socrates are incorrect for similar reasons. Humanity advances when it can hide complexity. Tools help with that. To argue against tooling because it makes you dependent on the tooling is like telling the construction worker to put away the jackhammer and pick up the pickaxe. Programmers are super productive (compared to other professions) because we can build tools that make us better programmers. The leverage recurses.

msbarnett 5y ago
> Humanity advances when it can hide complexity. Tools help with that. To argue against tooling because it makes you dependent on the tooling is like telling the construction worker to put away the jackhammer and pick up the pickaxe. Calling replacing ">=" with a ligature for "≥" "hiding complexity" strikes me as more than a bit of a stretch. They're two different visual presentations of the same thing, neither more or less complex in-and-of-themselves. The ligature has some external complexity, though, in that for certain things I have to remember that that's "really" 2 characters in the file, and backspacing directly in front of ≥ will net me > instead of deleting the entire thing. So if anything, ligatures are introducing a small bit of complexity that otherwise isn't there. Any relation to Socrates' quote seems forced.
- dharmaturtle 5y ago
  I had autocomplete more in mind.
- lupire 5y ago
  Reading code is harder than writing. It's good to make writing harder so reading is easier.
marginalia_nu 5y ago
Socrates did actually have a point, though. This goes for all technology. Sure, it often makes us more capable in one way, but in many other ways, it reduces our capabilities. Nobody today can memorize an epic like the Illiad today like people routinely would in Socrates' day. It a bit impressive if you can reproduce a 3 minute song text from memory. The Illiad often took days to recite. Sure you can argue that tools (like writing) allow us to do more, to store more information, but the point is that they also cut us off from doing other things. Recitation from memory is available even when there is no paper. This has gotten a lot worse recently, with tools like Wikipedia acting like external memory for a lot of people, granting them access to a lot of extremely superficial knowledge they don't actually possess themselves. It is certainly faster to look something up than to learn it, but a huge part of the benefit in actually knowing various things is to be able to connect what you are seeing now with something you know from beforehand, to generate a conclusion. That only works if you know the thing, you're not helped by theoretically being able to look it up. The same with auto completion. Sure you can type faster, but it also means you, as a human, become less capable because you've never needed to hone the skills necessary to program without it. Programming without autocompletion is available in any text editor, even on paper. Using tools is fine, but being completely reliant on them even to perform basic tasks is hobbling yourself. You turned yourself into an idiot in a powerarmor: Completely useless without your training wheels, unable to reason, unable to perform even simple menial tasks. I have a hard time seeing how that's made you, the human, more capable.
- tharkun__ 5y ago
  I think there's nuance to that. As in I think the truth lies in the middle. I am someone that wants to know 'enough' about how stuff works underneath. I don't like too many magic tools. I need to understand enough about it to be able to diagnose and work around failures. I have no qualms about using the tools though. I definitely want the jackhammer and the power armor! I want auto completion. It's awesome. It makes me so much more capable to quickly be productive in an unfamiliar code base or framework (if naming is sane ;)). If I don't have it? Sure I'll read the API docs and swear under my breath. Happens every time I gotta work on our python code. Could I do it better by having it in my working memory? Sure but I don't work with that code often enough for it to make sense to keep in memory (or learn in the first place).
couchand 5y ago
The best programmers I know are able to see through the abstraction and are comfortable getting into the lowest-level details. They have those skills because they've actually used them. I'm not saying we'd be better off without optimizing compliers, but I do think every programmer should have practical experience taking the lid off and poking around inside.
- simiones 5y ago
  There is a major difference between being able to poke into low-level details and being able to program at full efficiency in Microsoft Notepad or ed (which is what the OP seems to be advocating for). One is a rare and occasionally extremely useful skill, the other is basically a party trick, like being able to recite the Illiad from memory.
iforgotpassword 5y ago
I wonder if it ever collapses. It's probably unlikely, the analogy of layers that strictly build upon each other might not be the best, but on every iteration where we hide complexity, some knowledge from a few layers down is lost, and we might do one thing more efficient now, but another thing in a more convoluted way, without even realizing. So it's hard to say whether it was worth the tradeoff. I guess everyone working in tech for long enough has some pet peeve about where something was way easier 20 years ago, or stories about junior devs frequently not knowing X and doing Y in a really dumb way, and are super surprised when they learn X and then get told it had been around for decades. It's obviously a net gain after all, but if you were able to look at it from a distance with total knowledge, it's also hilariously stupid. But then that's exactly how evolution works, and why there's a nerve going from your brain to your throat taking a detour around the aorta.
- kodah 5y ago
  When I think about the "tower of abstractions" collapsing I usually end up coming back to the thought that it won't be a total collapse. It'll be a collapse to or around a specific layer of abstraction that we need to rework from (eg: something significant changed about a previously safe assumption). Like the 1906 earthquake in SF, it knocked down most buildings that had architecture that could not support the stress of an earth quake.

msbarnett 5y ago

> Humanity advances when it can hide complexity. Tools help with that. To argue against tooling because it makes you dependent on the tooling is like telling the construction worker to put away the jackhammer and pick up the pickaxe. Calling replacing ">=" with a ligature for "≥" "hiding complexity" strikes me as more than a bit of a stretch. They're two different visual presentations of the same thing, neither more or less complex in-and-of-themselves. The ligature has some external complexity, though, in that for certain things I have to remember that that's "really" 2 characters in the file, and backspacing directly in front of ≥ will net me > instead of deleting the entire thing. So if anything, ligatures are introducing a small bit of complexity that otherwise isn't there. Any relation to Socrates' quote seems forced.

dharmaturtle 5y ago
I had autocomplete more in mind.
lupire 5y ago
Reading code is harder than writing. It's good to make writing harder so reading is easier.

marginalia_nu 5y ago

Socrates did actually have a point, though. This goes for all technology. Sure, it often makes us more capable in one way, but in many other ways, it reduces our capabilities. Nobody today can memorize an epic like the Illiad today like people routinely would in Socrates' day. It a bit impressive if you can reproduce a 3 minute song text from memory. The Illiad often took days to recite. Sure you can argue that tools (like writing) allow us to do more, to store more information, but the point is that they also cut us off from doing other things. Recitation from memory is available even when there is no paper. This has gotten a lot worse recently, with tools like Wikipedia acting like external memory for a lot of people, granting them access to a lot of extremely superficial knowledge they don't actually possess themselves. It is certainly faster to look something up than to learn it, but a huge part of the benefit in actually knowing various things is to be able to connect what you are seeing now with something you know from beforehand, to generate a conclusion. That only works if you know the thing, you're not helped by theoretically being able to look it up. The same with auto completion. Sure you can type faster, but it also means you, as a human, become less capable because you've never needed to hone the skills necessary to program without it. Programming without autocompletion is available in any text editor, even on paper. Using tools is fine, but being completely reliant on them even to perform basic tasks is hobbling yourself. You turned yourself into an idiot in a powerarmor: Completely useless without your training wheels, unable to reason, unable to perform even simple menial tasks. I have a hard time seeing how that's made you, the human, more capable.

tharkun__ 5y ago
I think there's nuance to that. As in I think the truth lies in the middle. I am someone that wants to know 'enough' about how stuff works underneath. I don't like too many magic tools. I need to understand enough about it to be able to diagnose and work around failures. I have no qualms about using the tools though. I definitely want the jackhammer and the power armor! I want auto completion. It's awesome. It makes me so much more capable to quickly be productive in an unfamiliar code base or framework (if naming is sane ;)). If I don't have it? Sure I'll read the API docs and swear under my breath. Happens every time I gotta work on our python code. Could I do it better by having it in my working memory? Sure but I don't work with that code often enough for it to make sense to keep in memory (or learn in the first place).

couchand 5y ago

The best programmers I know are able to see through the abstraction and are comfortable getting into the lowest-level details. They have those skills because they've actually used them. I'm not saying we'd be better off without optimizing compliers, but I do think every programmer should have practical experience taking the lid off and poking around inside.

simiones 5y ago
There is a major difference between being able to poke into low-level details and being able to program at full efficiency in Microsoft Notepad or ed (which is what the OP seems to be advocating for). One is a rare and occasionally extremely useful skill, the other is basically a party trick, like being able to recite the Illiad from memory.

iforgotpassword 5y ago

I wonder if it ever collapses. It's probably unlikely, the analogy of layers that strictly build upon each other might not be the best, but on every iteration where we hide complexity, some knowledge from a few layers down is lost, and we might do one thing more efficient now, but another thing in a more convoluted way, without even realizing. So it's hard to say whether it was worth the tradeoff. I guess everyone working in tech for long enough has some pet peeve about where something was way easier 20 years ago, or stories about junior devs frequently not knowing X and doing Y in a really dumb way, and are super surprised when they learn X and then get told it had been around for decades. It's obviously a net gain after all, but if you were able to look at it from a distance with total knowledge, it's also hilariously stupid. But then that's exactly how evolution works, and why there's a nerve going from your brain to your throat taking a detour around the aorta.

kodah 5y ago
When I think about the "tower of abstractions" collapsing I usually end up coming back to the thought that it won't be a total collapse. It'll be a collapse to or around a specific layer of abstraction that we need to rework from (eg: something significant changed about a previously safe assumption). Like the 1906 earthquake in SF, it knocked down most buildings that had architecture that could not support the stress of an earth quake.