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> IT is too big to know entirely It is now... but I kind of feel like it wasn't 40 years ago. My 19-year-old son is studying CS now and I have a lot of sympat
by commandlinefan 3y ago
> IT is too big to know entirely
It is now... but I kind of feel like it wasn't 40 years ago. My 19-year-old son is studying CS now and I have a lot of sympathy for how complex it's all become since I was studying it 30+ years ago. Although computers can do way more than they could back then, you have to understand a lot more than you used to before you can get them to do the things they can do now.
- fragmede 3y agoYes and no. On a computer, you can open the developer console in the web browser and be there immediately. Go to a Github project and hit . and go to codespaces and be right there. Once you're there though, what to do becomes much harder.
- jeffrallen 3y ago40 years ago, you could know one or several microcomputers well, from BASIC down to assembly. But there was even at that time CAD happening on Unix, VAxes driving CAM, the entire IBM universe (from punched cards to RDBMS), and numerical codes like NASTRAN and LINPACK. Generalists are more valuable than specialists. But generalists are doomed to never knowing everything, and knowing what they don't know.
- pjmorris 3y ago> It is now... but I kind of feel like it wasn't 40 years ago. The computing world was certainly smaller then. But I remember finding Volume 1 of 'The Art of Computer Programming' in my community college library in the Spring of 1983 (so, it would've been a 70's edition) and Knuth said something to the effect of it being difficult to keep up with such a rapidly expanding field. My notion is that even the best programmers even 40 years ago had a hard time keeping up.