3 ms·

Everything you said ... absolutely and totally. I had a background similar to you. My first programming job was writing assembler for flight recorders and ADCs.

Everything you said ... absolutely and totally. I had a background similar to you. My first programming job was writing assembler for flight recorders and ADCs. Modern programming is a drudge. Everything encapsulated in increasing layers of abstraction and further away from what is actually happening. If it all disappeared tomorrow no one would know where to start from first principles again as these are no longer taught. Its a tragedy.

georgemcbay 15y ago
"If it all disappeared tomorrow no one would know where to start from first principles again as these are no longer taught." Modern Computer Science is a relatively new field... there are still early pioneers of the field who are quite alive. While I agree with you that today's abstractions make things less fun than they used to be for the average development job let's not get crazy with the hyperbole.
- Craiggybear 15y ago
  Speaking as I find, no hyperbole intended, I meet CS graduates who have no comprehension of a CLI or anything but the most incomplete notion of how memory or machine code works. I knew maths (and even history and modern language) students at university who had a complete and full understanding of these things and were also handy with a soldering iron and who could build a functional "computer" in a workshop as part of their degree -- utilising transistor logic. This is something you no longer see at most institutions today. I am sure it must be getting taught somewhere but it seems incredibly rare. By contrast, it was quite common when I was a student and was being done by people who weren't even doing CS as a subject. CS students today seem to know nothing other than Java and the IDE du jour -- and from lots of different institutions not just one. The best programmers I've met don't even have a CS degree (or even a degree) or they specialised in something utterly non-technical. But having logical, problem solving minds, they turned out to be first class coders -- usually because they had do develop something specific to help them do a certain job and they found the concepts easy. This was true of me, too.

georgemcbay 15y ago

"If it all disappeared tomorrow no one would know where to start from first principles again as these are no longer taught." Modern Computer Science is a relatively new field... there are still early pioneers of the field who are quite alive. While I agree with you that today's abstractions make things less fun than they used to be for the average development job let's not get crazy with the hyperbole.

Craiggybear 15y ago
Speaking as I find, no hyperbole intended, I meet CS graduates who have no comprehension of a CLI or anything but the most incomplete notion of how memory or machine code works. I knew maths (and even history and modern language) students at university who had a complete and full understanding of these things and were also handy with a soldering iron and who could build a functional "computer" in a workshop as part of their degree -- utilising transistor logic. This is something you no longer see at most institutions today. I am sure it must be getting taught somewhere but it seems incredibly rare. By contrast, it was quite common when I was a student and was being done by people who weren't even doing CS as a subject. CS students today seem to know nothing other than Java and the IDE du jour -- and from lots of different institutions not just one. The best programmers I've met don't even have a CS degree (or even a degree) or they specialised in something utterly non-technical. But having logical, problem solving minds, they turned out to be first class coders -- usually because they had do develop something specific to help them do a certain job and they found the concepts easy. This was true of me, too.