17 ms·

A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

122 points by angrycoder 15y ago

eterps 15y ago
That's why we need systems to be more like this: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf
- eterps 15y ago
  And even though the STEPS project above is about software, The Elements of Computing Systems [ http://amzn.to/xMTkWX http://amzn.to/xMTkWX ] proves that hardware can be understandable as well. Of course that architecture is far too simple to be useful today, but there are still a lot of opportunities that we are missing today: http://bit.ly/ySQf25 http://bit.ly/ySQf25
csomar 15y ago
That's not true. You can have complete understanding. You actually should have, if you want to be recognized in the industry. You need more than just learning, you need to live it. Pick an Operating System, and an environment. I'm using Windows, for more than 10 years now. And that's why I'm not moving to OS X any time soon. I'm incredibly good with Windows, and it can handle all of my daily business work, and software development, as well as entertainment. I'm on Web development for more than 4 years. It's an overwhelming field, if you ask me. Lots of stuff: Web servers (picked Abyss, played with Apache), HTTP, HTTPS (and SSL), Server Side (picked PHP), Database (picked mySql, played with Mongo), HTML5 (lots of new API), JavaScript (not that simple, and a new spec. is coming), CSS3, Photoshop (some skills to get by). And then there are lots of other things: caching, optimization, patterns, ORM, CMS (WordPress, Drupal...), frameworks (CodeIgniter, Symphony...), libraries (jQuery, Prototype...), best-practices, security (SQL injections, encryption...), Unit Testing (Jasmin, PHPunit...), Code Inspection (JSlint), IDEs (Aptana, PHPstorm...), Mobiles (Titanium, Sencha...) And certainly for business (you probably run your server on Ubuntu) there is Postfix, dovecot for email, SFTP for an FTP server, Mercurial or Git for Version Control and some other stuff to monitor your servers (and maybe services) And then there is more stuff, if you run an online business like HN, SmashingMagazine, GitHub, Envato, AppStore and all social networks, magazines, markets... So how can you do it? First, it'll take years. Second, you must live it. When you live it, you'll forget about the quantity, and with time you'll keep all those things in your head.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- nzmsv 15y ago
  This depends on the definition of "complete". Yes, you've described a pretty comprehensive summary of the web stack and related tools. But this is all application software. What about the underlying network protocols? The OS kernel? The CPU architecture? Cache coherency protocols? Direct memory access to shuffle data to the network card? The physical layer signalling to get this data across the wire? PCB layout? Schematic design? How about the power supply for all this? A couple decades ago one could actually buy a computer as a kit and put the circuit boards together. And even then it was unlikely that you could know everything: even if you were Woz, you probably would not have seen the masks used to make the CPU.
- charliesome 15y ago
  I doubt you have complete understanding though. Do you understand how SSL works? Do you know your way around PHP's internals? Do you know exactly how TCP, IP, Ethernet, etc work? Could you write a Photoshop plugin? Do you understand how parsers and compilers work? I doubt you (or anyone else for that matter) could answer yes to all those questions. That's the point I think this blog post is getting at. It's no longer possible (question for the reader: was it ever possible, given how deep the rabbit hole goes?) to have a complete understanding of how all the technologies you use every day work. A lot of people have a decent understanding of most things they need to deal with. That's probably good enough to get by.
  - wladimir 15y ago
    was it ever possible, given how deep the rabbit hole goes? I don't think so. People have always complained that the more you know, the more you realize you don't know. But lately we're more and more confronted with our limitations as humans. There are so darn many details, so much information. And no field is static, it's hard to keep up. As programmers/software engineers we're required to have a lot of specific product knowledge. And much of it is very important at one point, and nearly useless the next moment, as new versions are released, as new systems replace the older ones, and old assumptions are overturned.
obeattie 15y ago
Relevance: I, Pencil http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I,_Pencil http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I,_Pencil
ericHosick 15y ago
I think it's the addition of new information/technology without reflecting on and simplifying existing information/technology which is leading to this problem of information overload.
codeonfire 15y ago
11000 pages at 3 min per page is roughly 550 hours of reading, which is roughly 3 months of full time reading. Double that for some exercises and review and a good understanding is doable in about 6 months.
- barrkel 15y ago
  There is no way you can do exercises at a rate of 3 minutes per page of material, for material of any density. For many concepts, you'd do well to do exercises at a rate of one day per page; exercises that would be essential to a good understanding. I remember first encountering tree views in Borland Delphi 2. Took me a good couple of days before I got the hang of them, and how they interacted with image lists, to fully get how the recursive structure held together, how the dependencies interlinked. Similarly with OpenGL. Took quite some time to get the hang of the sequencing of matrix operations, world and camera transforms, etc. - all just the very basics, before getting into anything interesting at all. For real learning, 8 hours a day is simply unrealistic. It wasn't until the third or fourth time I tried many things that I really understood them, to the point that I didn't have to follow any recipes anywhere.
DodgyEggplant 15y ago
as usual, it's already written in the bible: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LordPalmerston.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LordPalmerston.html "There was a time when if you read one book by Peter Norton, you literally knew everything there was to know about programming the IBM-PC"
- Intermernet 15y ago
  I'll take a guess and say that that time was well in the past by 1990. I remember the confusion over XMS / EMS and how to write programs that could use extended / expanded memory. It all depends on how far into the system you want to look. How many users of the FAT file system actually learnt the innards of NTFS? How many programmers specialized on Borland IDEs rather than WatCom? There's not really that much more to learn these days if you want to just write software; understanding the entire system is a matter of jumping down the rabbit hole. If I understand how electron tunneling prevents processor architecture going much beyond the current state of the art, do I have a greater understanding of computers than someone who knows the OpenGL API backwards?
  - DodgyEggplant 15y ago
    I agree. And in case you have some specific bottleneck you can always go into that. As knowledge grows, it happens in every science. However, it's another feeling when you have a good grasp of the entire system.
- JulianMorrison 15y ago
  That's mainly because DOS couldn't do anything. If you want to reproduce the capabilities of DOS - single tasking, single threading file and screen IO in text or simple non-windowed graphics - you really wouldn't need to learn much more nowadays.
  - gaius 15y ago
    A lot of people did a lot of real work on DOS (or CP/M, or whatever) systems. And they knew a lot more than today's Ruby On Rail For Dummies crowd.
sherwin 15y ago
Yes, the author's observation is true, but I don't think it's particularly interesting for two reasons: 1) This isn't anything new. A complete understanding is not only no longer possible, it was never possible. What level of detail counts as a "complete" understanding? Even when computers were much simpler, you probably wouldn't have a thorough understanding of every layer of abstraction, from software to hardware to the physics of the underlying electrical components. 2) This sort of complete understanding is unnecessary anyway; these references exist as references for a reason. To do your job, you need familiarity and layered understandings of the relevant processes, and when you absolutely need to know the fine details of something, you can simply look it up.
- Spearchucker 15y ago
  Respectfully, I disagree. Such a complete understanding is eminently possible. It is as easy to understand as any other complex system. You work at a high level of abstraction to understand the breadth of complexity, and then work down into the component level to understand the depth of complexity. Rinse, and repeat for every subsequent level. The caveat is that it takes time and dedication. I can't comment on whether it's necessary or not. There might be scenarios where it is. There might be other scenarios where you're better off studying kung fu, because that might be a quicker route to enlightenment.
  - DanBC 15y ago
    Clifford Stoll, in "The Cuckoo's Egg"[1] describes the hardest interview he ever had. The interviewer asked "Why is the sky blue?" and then, after Stoll gave his answer, asked "Why?" This process repeated several times, until Stoll was describing in great detail some advanced physics and chemistry and math. In that spirit: Please could you describe electron and hole flow in semiconductors? Why? Why? Why? There's lots of bits of computing that works because it works even though we don't really know why it works.
    - gtani 15y ago
      http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3606653 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3606653
erwan574 15y ago
I agree with the point of this article, and I find this quite ennoying. The problem is not that a single individual cannot master everything but that the reward for learning a part of the book pile becomes lower and lower in proportion to the required effort. This trend is clearly discouraging students to "jump" in some of these fundamental reference books. And teachers find it probably very difficult to provide applied exercises for their theoretical teaching. "Which do you choose ? How do you know which one will be useful in 5 years ?" My suggestion is that academia standardize in a virtual machine, like what Knuth started to do with MIX and MMIX. these VM can provide a stable, simpler target to help students and professionnals to enjoy "more complete understanding". I expect this to make learning a lot more fun. When there is a clear breakthrough in technology (like multicore systems), then a new version of the VM can be specified. This can help to improve communication between academia and the real world : btw MMIX was specified with input from experienced chip archicture designers.
- tluyben2 15y ago
  If you learn the basics well (of logic, hardware, functional programming, imperative programming etc) (and by well I do not mean a bit of practical tinkering; I mean a few years of studying theoretical foundations in-depth and applying those on several non-trivial practical cases), this will be useful in 5 years. It will be useful the rest of your life. My theoretical foundations in CS, AI, Math (esp discrete) and physics from the late 80s/begin 90s allow me to read cutting edge papers (memristors, spintronics), learn new languages fast, read 'modern' source code and understand modern hardware architectures. This is 'knowledge' from 20 years ago; not that much has changed tbh on low levels. Actually ; my dad enjoyed his education under Dijkstra in Eindhoven (and others, but this I now find cool :) and he also understands hardware and software on a low level after almost 50 years. I don't see this panicky 'what you learn is obsolete when you finish uni'; might be for some studies, but for math/physics/cs it definitely isn't (again IFF the education is not flaky; there are plenty uni's I know of which are teaching CS courses which are WAY too practical ; students coming from there 'know' C# and find it very hard to do anything else. That's not a solid foundation at all. Example; university of Dubai.).
tluyben2 15y ago
For knowing 'everything' about computers, I suggest buying a few 8-bit 80s systems with all included for <$50, buy http://www.xgamestation.com/ http://www.xgamestation.com/ and master that hardware/software. It's relaxing, a lot of fun, and you'll 'get' modern hardware/arch/OSs as well after that. Shame is you cannot mold modern hardware/software so much easily, so after learning all this old stuff you might end up spending more time making hardware extensions for those systems rather than writing your RoR CRUD screens.
lhnz 15y ago
A 'complete' understanding including every single tiny detail has never been possible in any complex subject ever and this isn't bad as you seem to think. Certain knowledge has more utility in your craft than other knowledge [0]. Also, and more importantly, some knowledge when held with other knowledge creates emergent understanding of other knowledge. You are able to intuit from core principles. The ability to understand is far more important than the ability to recall. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
ilaksh 15y ago
Article makes a good point. However, no one mentioned Google. I think people are afraid to admit how often they Google search things. I started teaching myself programming when I was 7. I am 34 now. There is plenty of stuff that I remember, but a lot more that I don't and I don't try to. And I find out about a new piece of software, service or whatever every day or every few days. I am proud of the fact that I Google so much. I think its actually more important and more useful to be able to Google things and quickly get the gist of a new thing (or look up some old syntax) and drill down into a solution than it is to know lots of stuff off the top of your head. Mainly because there are so many tools, frameworks, programming languages coming out that if you don't Google first you will usually end up wasting a lot of time. I think the main thing holding science and technology (including information technology of course) back right now is the limited ability to integrate knowledge and thought and its application. Google is the closest we have come to a solution to that problem. But I think we may see something like a metasystem transition resulting in some higher-level integration and organization for knowledge, technology, and its application to problem solving. It could come through some kind of artificial general intelligence, or maybe just some type of advanced knowledge/semantic engineering/collaboration system. Or maybe high bandwidth brain-computer interfaces will allow brains to be networked and even integrated wirelessly.
bwarp 15y ago
A complete understanding if you ask me is one which requires no impenetrable "black-box abstractions" to be substituted in the abstraction hierarchy. In the case of a CPU, you would have to have a full gate level understanding of it and an understanding of how the gates operate. To be honest, the "complete understanding" died way before the original post. It was the moment that they started building computers with integrated circuits inside them (before 1970) and complexity rocketed logarithmically. It died doubly so the moment that electrical engineering and the practical side of computer science diverged into "them" and "us". If you want to use something which you understand, you will probably need to buy a crate of transistors, resistors and diodes and wirewrap yourself an entire computer from scratch PDP-7 style. This fact is a warning: We really are building things with too deep abstraction hierarchies causing knowledge to be divided. One day we will never hope to comprehend anything in a lifetime.
- gaius 15y ago
  I do all my "fun" computing these days on a BBC Micro, in assembly language. I don't have total understanding of the ICs, it's true. But in its 64k of addressable memory (32k RAM), I've a pretty good idea of where everything is and what happens when. Very satisfying.
  - jgw 15y ago
    Very cool. I still have the old Osborne 1 on which I learned to program. Interesting historical point - the BBC Micro was designed by Acorn Computers, who are the parent of the ARM processors that are so ubiquitous today.
    - gaius 15y ago
      Indeed, the original ARM was designed on a BBC Micro + 6502 Co-Pro. Amazing what "real work" you can get done on one :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#History
      - 15y ago
haraldk 15y ago
In our society, my take on this is that one shouldn't try to understand everything. We get smarter as a whole if different individuals focus on different areas. I'm not saying no one should collaborate, but 6 billion jack-of-all-trades, master-of-nothing simply is not smart enough to care for the next billion. Read "The Shallows" by Nicholas Carr, it discuss this very topic. Humanity had the the same discussion when the printing press became normal. People could start to look up things in books instead of remembering everything (analogy: you're searching the interwebs).
- epscylonb 15y ago
  I agree, but apparently we are in the age of the polymath.
bnegreve 15y ago
Well, on the other hand, if you know a bit about hardware, it is fairly easy to build a simple yet fully functional processor from basic components, implementing an OS with most common features and a compiler with advanced error checking and an optimizer is also doable. You probably need to be familiar with math as well. Now anyone with this knowledge can become very expert in whatever field he is interested in. Why would you know everything, from electrons to software ?
suprgeek 15y ago
A complete understanding is no longer necessary. It never was. Think about any time in history where a complete understand WAS necessary. - Now we come to the question of when a complete understanding was Possible. As soon as the age of computing dawned with ICs (Integrated circuits) rather than vacuum tubes, the age of complete understanding was dead. Fewer and fewer people knew the internals of the most complex invention of humanity (computers). I think at some point in the IBM PC age, the number of people with a complete understanding dwindled to zero.
- jacquesm 15y ago
  > As soon as the age of computing dawned with ICs (Integrated circuits) rather than vacuum tubes, the age of complete understanding was dead. That's complete nonsense. Until the second half of the 16 bit era (before the 68K series) it was possible to completely grok the schematic of a computer and all of the associated parts, including disk drives and the guts of each of the chips, and to know each and every byte of software that ran on it. It was a lot of work but it could be done. Be it at the block level or for the die-hard fanatics all the way down to gates (and the transistors that made up those gates). From there forward it got harder and harder to keep the whole stack from software to the lowest hardware layers in mind when writing code. And it wasn't necessary anyway! After all, code is already a very high level of abstraction. But even today it helps to know the guts of compilers, caching, branch prediction, register optimization, the difference between various buses and their typical latencies when writing high performance software. So even if it is no longer possible to know each and every detail there still is a degree of necessity. And there always will be. But now we will have to be satisfied with an understanding limited by the resources that are at our disposal. The result is that we specialize. Which happens in every branch of science that is sufficiently advanced. A single second of cycles on a modern computer is more than you could conceivably analyze in a lifetime because of the volume. But in principle, given enough patience it could be done. In principle, given enough time and resources you could understand your computer at the same level as before. But our lives are too short and our brains too small to hold these quantities of information so we deal with abstractions instead. Just like you can't have a complete understanding of every atom in the banana that you eat there is a degree of useful knowledge to which you can abstract it: ripeness, flavor, color, general quality and so on. Plenty of people have opened up VLSI chips and put them under a microscope just as plenty of people have looked at a thin slice of banana. And in both cases they came away with an increased understanding. It's all about the investment in resources, not about the possibility. The moment we can no longer completely understand our machines is when they'll stop to be deterministic. And by that time chances are that we'll call them biology.
js2 15y ago
I learned on an Apple II. It came with the necessary manually to almost fully understand it, including a hardware manual that included a schematic of the motherboard. As I recall, the ICs were treated as blackboxes by that manual, but barely so. By the Apple IIe, I think this level of documentation had been dropped by Apple, but they were still at least making an effort to explain the inner workings of the machine: http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Manuals/desktops/AppleIIeUG.PDF http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Manuals/de... Ch 4: The Inside Story. When you connected your disk drive to your Apple IIe, you popped the top and got your first look at the integrated circuits, or chips, inside the computer. In this chapter, you'll learn what some of the chips do, and how they are used to process your data. ... It's interested that the more complicated the computer got, the more sparse the end-user documentation became.
mark_l_watson 15y ago
The article talks about what I would call "pre-emptive understanding," but what about "just in time understanding?" Have a good general understanding of a platform (all the way down to hardware, if you wish) and know where to look when either curiosity or need arises.
alimbada 15y ago
My strategy is just-in-time learning. Anyone attempting to eager load all the knowledge is either crazy or exceptionally brilliant.
olalonde 15y ago
I think being on level
olalonde 15y ago
I think a more realistic goal for our time is to aim at being at level 1 of ignorance (ignorance with awareness) [1]. [1] http://andrewboland.blogspot.com/2008/08/five-levels-of-ignorance.html http://andrewboland.blogspot.com/2008/08/five-levels-of-igno... (just submitted on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3643445 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3643445)
its_so_on 15y ago
let's say you've just had a baby, a little bundle of joy, and you want to read all the books about babies so you can understand it completely. you can "understand a baby" just fine. you can never gain a "complete understanding" of man.
thesash 15y ago
There was an article on HN in the last year that addressed this, i.e the amount of knowledge required to understand a complex application from distributed software to assembly language, to hardware. I think the title was something about unknowable depths of complexity, does anyone remember the link?
donnaware 15y ago
Leonardo Da Vinci was probably the last person to understand completely everything that he worked on to the level that was possible for the era he lived in. Since then, I doubt anyone can achieve that, but interestingly, thanks to the internet, one can instantly access the knowledge of almost anything at almost any level. If I choose, I choose today! (or 100 years from now :)
rsanchez1 15y ago
That's kind of the point. Modularity allows all these complicated parts to work together as a unified whole, without the creator of any one part needing to know exactly how the other part works. It's how high school kids are able to write their own computer programs instead of having to go to college for 12 years. It's what allowed cars to be assembled en masse. It's not a problem, and if it ever is, at least you have a 11,000 pages of text from the creators giving you a complete explanation.
erwan574 15y ago
A few books exist that try to restore some sort of "complete understanding" : Software programming starting from assembly language under linux : http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Ground-Up-Jonathan-Bartlett/dp/0975283847 http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Ground-Up-Jonathan-Bartlet... A study going from chip design to high level programming : http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Computing-Systems-Building-Principles/dp/026214087X http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Computing-Systems-Building-Pr... IHMO this "problem" of "incomplete vision" started when device drivers where introduced in general purpose OS. Professionnal application developpers started to target API instead of hardware. A milestone in this trend for me is Windows 3.0 (1990). This also marks the demise of fixed hardware computers that the hobbyist favored so far.

122 points by angrycoder 15y ago

That's why we need systems to be more like this: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf

eterps 15y ago
And even though the STEPS project above is about software, The Elements of Computing Systems [ http://amzn.to/xMTkWX http://amzn.to/xMTkWX ] proves that hardware can be understandable as well. Of course that architecture is far too simple to be useful today, but there are still a lot of opportunities that we are missing today: http://bit.ly/ySQf25 http://bit.ly/ySQf25

csomar 15y ago

That's not true. You can have complete understanding. You actually should have, if you want to be recognized in the industry. You need more than just learning, you need to live it. Pick an Operating System, and an environment. I'm using Windows, for more than 10 years now. And that's why I'm not moving to OS X any time soon. I'm incredibly good with Windows, and it can handle all of my daily business work, and software development, as well as entertainment. I'm on Web development for more than 4 years. It's an overwhelming field, if you ask me. Lots of stuff: Web servers (picked Abyss, played with Apache), HTTP, HTTPS (and SSL), Server Side (picked PHP), Database (picked mySql, played with Mongo), HTML5 (lots of new API), JavaScript (not that simple, and a new spec. is coming), CSS3, Photoshop (some skills to get by). And then there are lots of other things: caching, optimization, patterns, ORM, CMS (WordPress, Drupal...), frameworks (CodeIgniter, Symphony...), libraries (jQuery, Prototype...), best-practices, security (SQL injections, encryption...), Unit Testing (Jasmin, PHPunit...), Code Inspection (JSlint), IDEs (Aptana, PHPstorm...), Mobiles (Titanium, Sencha...) And certainly for business (you probably run your server on Ubuntu) there is Postfix, dovecot for email, SFTP for an FTP server, Mercurial or Git for Version Control and some other stuff to monitor your servers (and maybe services) And then there is more stuff, if you run an online business like HN, SmashingMagazine, GitHub, Envato, AppStore and all social networks, magazines, markets... So how can you do it? First, it'll take years. Second, you must live it. When you live it, you'll forget about the quantity, and with time you'll keep all those things in your head.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
nzmsv 15y ago
This depends on the definition of "complete". Yes, you've described a pretty comprehensive summary of the web stack and related tools. But this is all application software. What about the underlying network protocols? The OS kernel? The CPU architecture? Cache coherency protocols? Direct memory access to shuffle data to the network card? The physical layer signalling to get this data across the wire? PCB layout? Schematic design? How about the power supply for all this? A couple decades ago one could actually buy a computer as a kit and put the circuit boards together. And even then it was unlikely that you could know everything: even if you were Woz, you probably would not have seen the masks used to make the CPU.
charliesome 15y ago
I doubt you have complete understanding though. Do you understand how SSL works? Do you know your way around PHP's internals? Do you know exactly how TCP, IP, Ethernet, etc work? Could you write a Photoshop plugin? Do you understand how parsers and compilers work? I doubt you (or anyone else for that matter) could answer yes to all those questions. That's the point I think this blog post is getting at. It's no longer possible (question for the reader: was it ever possible, given how deep the rabbit hole goes?) to have a complete understanding of how all the technologies you use every day work. A lot of people have a decent understanding of most things they need to deal with. That's probably good enough to get by.
- wladimir 15y ago
  was it ever possible, given how deep the rabbit hole goes? I don't think so. People have always complained that the more you know, the more you realize you don't know. But lately we're more and more confronted with our limitations as humans. There are so darn many details, so much information. And no field is static, it's hard to keep up. As programmers/software engineers we're required to have a lot of specific product knowledge. And much of it is very important at one point, and nearly useless the next moment, as new versions are released, as new systems replace the older ones, and old assumptions are overturned.

obeattie 15y ago

Relevance: I, Pencil http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I,_Pencil http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I,_Pencil

ericHosick 15y ago

I think it's the addition of new information/technology without reflecting on and simplifying existing information/technology which is leading to this problem of information overload.

codeonfire 15y ago

11000 pages at 3 min per page is roughly 550 hours of reading, which is roughly 3 months of full time reading. Double that for some exercises and review and a good understanding is doable in about 6 months.

barrkel 15y ago
There is no way you can do exercises at a rate of 3 minutes per page of material, for material of any density. For many concepts, you'd do well to do exercises at a rate of one day per page; exercises that would be essential to a good understanding. I remember first encountering tree views in Borland Delphi 2. Took me a good couple of days before I got the hang of them, and how they interacted with image lists, to fully get how the recursive structure held together, how the dependencies interlinked. Similarly with OpenGL. Took quite some time to get the hang of the sequencing of matrix operations, world and camera transforms, etc. - all just the very basics, before getting into anything interesting at all. For real learning, 8 hours a day is simply unrealistic. It wasn't until the third or fourth time I tried many things that I really understood them, to the point that I didn't have to follow any recipes anywhere.

DodgyEggplant 15y ago

as usual, it's already written in the bible: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LordPalmerston.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LordPalmerston.html "There was a time when if you read one book by Peter Norton, you literally knew everything there was to know about programming the IBM-PC"

Intermernet 15y ago
I'll take a guess and say that that time was well in the past by 1990. I remember the confusion over XMS / EMS and how to write programs that could use extended / expanded memory. It all depends on how far into the system you want to look. How many users of the FAT file system actually learnt the innards of NTFS? How many programmers specialized on Borland IDEs rather than WatCom? There's not really that much more to learn these days if you want to just write software; understanding the entire system is a matter of jumping down the rabbit hole. If I understand how electron tunneling prevents processor architecture going much beyond the current state of the art, do I have a greater understanding of computers than someone who knows the OpenGL API backwards?
- DodgyEggplant 15y ago
  I agree. And in case you have some specific bottleneck you can always go into that. As knowledge grows, it happens in every science. However, it's another feeling when you have a good grasp of the entire system.
JulianMorrison 15y ago
That's mainly because DOS couldn't do anything. If you want to reproduce the capabilities of DOS - single tasking, single threading file and screen IO in text or simple non-windowed graphics - you really wouldn't need to learn much more nowadays.
- gaius 15y ago
  A lot of people did a lot of real work on DOS (or CP/M, or whatever) systems. And they knew a lot more than today's Ruby On Rail For Dummies crowd.

sherwin 15y ago

Yes, the author's observation is true, but I don't think it's particularly interesting for two reasons: 1) This isn't anything new. A complete understanding is not only no longer possible, it was never possible. What level of detail counts as a "complete" understanding? Even when computers were much simpler, you probably wouldn't have a thorough understanding of every layer of abstraction, from software to hardware to the physics of the underlying electrical components. 2) This sort of complete understanding is unnecessary anyway; these references exist as references for a reason. To do your job, you need familiarity and layered understandings of the relevant processes, and when you absolutely need to know the fine details of something, you can simply look it up.

Spearchucker 15y ago
Respectfully, I disagree. Such a complete understanding is eminently possible. It is as easy to understand as any other complex system. You work at a high level of abstraction to understand the breadth of complexity, and then work down into the component level to understand the depth of complexity. Rinse, and repeat for every subsequent level. The caveat is that it takes time and dedication. I can't comment on whether it's necessary or not. There might be scenarios where it is. There might be other scenarios where you're better off studying kung fu, because that might be a quicker route to enlightenment.
- DanBC 15y ago
  Clifford Stoll, in "The Cuckoo's Egg"[1] describes the hardest interview he ever had. The interviewer asked "Why is the sky blue?" and then, after Stoll gave his answer, asked "Why?" This process repeated several times, until Stoll was describing in great detail some advanced physics and chemistry and math. In that spirit: Please could you describe electron and hole flow in semiconductors? Why? Why? Why? There's lots of bits of computing that works because it works even though we don't really know why it works.
  - gtani 15y ago
    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3606653 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3606653

erwan574 15y ago

I agree with the point of this article, and I find this quite ennoying. The problem is not that a single individual cannot master everything but that the reward for learning a part of the book pile becomes lower and lower in proportion to the required effort. This trend is clearly discouraging students to "jump" in some of these fundamental reference books. And teachers find it probably very difficult to provide applied exercises for their theoretical teaching. "Which do you choose ? How do you know which one will be useful in 5 years ?" My suggestion is that academia standardize in a virtual machine, like what Knuth started to do with MIX and MMIX. these VM can provide a stable, simpler target to help students and professionnals to enjoy "more complete understanding". I expect this to make learning a lot more fun. When there is a clear breakthrough in technology (like multicore systems), then a new version of the VM can be specified. This can help to improve communication between academia and the real world : btw MMIX was specified with input from experienced chip archicture designers.

tluyben2 15y ago
If you learn the basics well (of logic, hardware, functional programming, imperative programming etc) (and by well I do not mean a bit of practical tinkering; I mean a few years of studying theoretical foundations in-depth and applying those on several non-trivial practical cases), this will be useful in 5 years. It will be useful the rest of your life. My theoretical foundations in CS, AI, Math (esp discrete) and physics from the late 80s/begin 90s allow me to read cutting edge papers (memristors, spintronics), learn new languages fast, read 'modern' source code and understand modern hardware architectures. This is 'knowledge' from 20 years ago; not that much has changed tbh on low levels. Actually ; my dad enjoyed his education under Dijkstra in Eindhoven (and others, but this I now find cool :) and he also understands hardware and software on a low level after almost 50 years. I don't see this panicky 'what you learn is obsolete when you finish uni'; might be for some studies, but for math/physics/cs it definitely isn't (again IFF the education is not flaky; there are plenty uni's I know of which are teaching CS courses which are WAY too practical ; students coming from there 'know' C# and find it very hard to do anything else. That's not a solid foundation at all. Example; university of Dubai.).

tluyben2 15y ago

For knowing 'everything' about computers, I suggest buying a few 8-bit 80s systems with all included for <$50, buy http://www.xgamestation.com/ http://www.xgamestation.com/ and master that hardware/software. It's relaxing, a lot of fun, and you'll 'get' modern hardware/arch/OSs as well after that. Shame is you cannot mold modern hardware/software so much easily, so after learning all this old stuff you might end up spending more time making hardware extensions for those systems rather than writing your RoR CRUD screens.

lhnz 15y ago

A 'complete' understanding including every single tiny detail has never been possible in any complex subject ever and this isn't bad as you seem to think. Certain knowledge has more utility in your craft than other knowledge [0]. Also, and more importantly, some knowledge when held with other knowledge creates emergent understanding of other knowledge. You are able to intuit from core principles. The ability to understand is far more important than the ability to recall. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

ilaksh 15y ago

Article makes a good point. However, no one mentioned Google. I think people are afraid to admit how often they Google search things. I started teaching myself programming when I was 7. I am 34 now. There is plenty of stuff that I remember, but a lot more that I don't and I don't try to. And I find out about a new piece of software, service or whatever every day or every few days. I am proud of the fact that I Google so much. I think its actually more important and more useful to be able to Google things and quickly get the gist of a new thing (or look up some old syntax) and drill down into a solution than it is to know lots of stuff off the top of your head. Mainly because there are so many tools, frameworks, programming languages coming out that if you don't Google first you will usually end up wasting a lot of time. I think the main thing holding science and technology (including information technology of course) back right now is the limited ability to integrate knowledge and thought and its application. Google is the closest we have come to a solution to that problem. But I think we may see something like a metasystem transition resulting in some higher-level integration and organization for knowledge, technology, and its application to problem solving. It could come through some kind of artificial general intelligence, or maybe just some type of advanced knowledge/semantic engineering/collaboration system. Or maybe high bandwidth brain-computer interfaces will allow brains to be networked and even integrated wirelessly.

bwarp 15y ago

A complete understanding if you ask me is one which requires no impenetrable "black-box abstractions" to be substituted in the abstraction hierarchy. In the case of a CPU, you would have to have a full gate level understanding of it and an understanding of how the gates operate. To be honest, the "complete understanding" died way before the original post. It was the moment that they started building computers with integrated circuits inside them (before 1970) and complexity rocketed logarithmically. It died doubly so the moment that electrical engineering and the practical side of computer science diverged into "them" and "us". If you want to use something which you understand, you will probably need to buy a crate of transistors, resistors and diodes and wirewrap yourself an entire computer from scratch PDP-7 style. This fact is a warning: We really are building things with too deep abstraction hierarchies causing knowledge to be divided. One day we will never hope to comprehend anything in a lifetime.

gaius 15y ago
I do all my "fun" computing these days on a BBC Micro, in assembly language. I don't have total understanding of the ICs, it's true. But in its 64k of addressable memory (32k RAM), I've a pretty good idea of where everything is and what happens when. Very satisfying.
- jgw 15y ago
  Very cool. I still have the old Osborne 1 on which I learned to program. Interesting historical point - the BBC Micro was designed by Acorn Computers, who are the parent of the ARM processors that are so ubiquitous today.
  - gaius 15y ago
    Indeed, the original ARM was designed on a BBC Micro + 6502 Co-Pro. Amazing what "real work" you can get done on one :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#History
    - 15y ago

haraldk 15y ago

In our society, my take on this is that one shouldn't try to understand everything. We get smarter as a whole if different individuals focus on different areas. I'm not saying no one should collaborate, but 6 billion jack-of-all-trades, master-of-nothing simply is not smart enough to care for the next billion. Read "The Shallows" by Nicholas Carr, it discuss this very topic. Humanity had the the same discussion when the printing press became normal. People could start to look up things in books instead of remembering everything (analogy: you're searching the interwebs).

epscylonb 15y ago
I agree, but apparently we are in the age of the polymath.

bnegreve 15y ago

Well, on the other hand, if you know a bit about hardware, it is fairly easy to build a simple yet fully functional processor from basic components, implementing an OS with most common features and a compiler with advanced error checking and an optimizer is also doable. You probably need to be familiar with math as well. Now anyone with this knowledge can become very expert in whatever field he is interested in. Why would you know everything, from electrons to software ?

suprgeek 15y ago

A complete understanding is no longer necessary. It never was. Think about any time in history where a complete understand WAS necessary. - Now we come to the question of when a complete understanding was Possible. As soon as the age of computing dawned with ICs (Integrated circuits) rather than vacuum tubes, the age of complete understanding was dead. Fewer and fewer people knew the internals of the most complex invention of humanity (computers). I think at some point in the IBM PC age, the number of people with a complete understanding dwindled to zero.

jacquesm 15y ago
> As soon as the age of computing dawned with ICs (Integrated circuits) rather than vacuum tubes, the age of complete understanding was dead. That's complete nonsense. Until the second half of the 16 bit era (before the 68K series) it was possible to completely grok the schematic of a computer and all of the associated parts, including disk drives and the guts of each of the chips, and to know each and every byte of software that ran on it. It was a lot of work but it could be done. Be it at the block level or for the die-hard fanatics all the way down to gates (and the transistors that made up those gates). From there forward it got harder and harder to keep the whole stack from software to the lowest hardware layers in mind when writing code. And it wasn't necessary anyway! After all, code is already a very high level of abstraction. But even today it helps to know the guts of compilers, caching, branch prediction, register optimization, the difference between various buses and their typical latencies when writing high performance software. So even if it is no longer possible to know each and every detail there still is a degree of necessity. And there always will be. But now we will have to be satisfied with an understanding limited by the resources that are at our disposal. The result is that we specialize. Which happens in every branch of science that is sufficiently advanced. A single second of cycles on a modern computer is more than you could conceivably analyze in a lifetime because of the volume. But in principle, given enough patience it could be done. In principle, given enough time and resources you could understand your computer at the same level as before. But our lives are too short and our brains too small to hold these quantities of information so we deal with abstractions instead. Just like you can't have a complete understanding of every atom in the banana that you eat there is a degree of useful knowledge to which you can abstract it: ripeness, flavor, color, general quality and so on. Plenty of people have opened up VLSI chips and put them under a microscope just as plenty of people have looked at a thin slice of banana. And in both cases they came away with an increased understanding. It's all about the investment in resources, not about the possibility. The moment we can no longer completely understand our machines is when they'll stop to be deterministic. And by that time chances are that we'll call them biology.

js2 15y ago

I learned on an Apple II. It came with the necessary manually to almost fully understand it, including a hardware manual that included a schematic of the motherboard. As I recall, the ICs were treated as blackboxes by that manual, but barely so. By the Apple IIe, I think this level of documentation had been dropped by Apple, but they were still at least making an effort to explain the inner workings of the machine: http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Manuals/desktops/AppleIIeUG.PDF http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Manuals/de... Ch 4: The Inside Story. When you connected your disk drive to your Apple IIe, you popped the top and got your first look at the integrated circuits, or chips, inside the computer. In this chapter, you'll learn what some of the chips do, and how they are used to process your data. ... It's interested that the more complicated the computer got, the more sparse the end-user documentation became.

mark_l_watson 15y ago

The article talks about what I would call "pre-emptive understanding," but what about "just in time understanding?" Have a good general understanding of a platform (all the way down to hardware, if you wish) and know where to look when either curiosity or need arises.

alimbada 15y ago

My strategy is just-in-time learning. Anyone attempting to eager load all the knowledge is either crazy or exceptionally brilliant.

olalonde 15y ago

I think being on level

olalonde 15y ago

I think a more realistic goal for our time is to aim at being at level 1 of ignorance (ignorance with awareness) [1]. [1] http://andrewboland.blogspot.com/2008/08/five-levels-of-ignorance.html http://andrewboland.blogspot.com/2008/08/five-levels-of-igno... (just submitted on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3643445 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3643445)

its_so_on 15y ago

let's say you've just had a baby, a little bundle of joy, and you want to read all the books about babies so you can understand it completely. you can "understand a baby" just fine. you can never gain a "complete understanding" of man.

thesash 15y ago

There was an article on HN in the last year that addressed this, i.e the amount of knowledge required to understand a complex application from distributed software to assembly language, to hardware. I think the title was something about unknowable depths of complexity, does anyone remember the link?

donnaware 15y ago

Leonardo Da Vinci was probably the last person to understand completely everything that he worked on to the level that was possible for the era he lived in. Since then, I doubt anyone can achieve that, but interestingly, thanks to the internet, one can instantly access the knowledge of almost anything at almost any level. If I choose, I choose today! (or 100 years from now :)

rsanchez1 15y ago

That's kind of the point. Modularity allows all these complicated parts to work together as a unified whole, without the creator of any one part needing to know exactly how the other part works. It's how high school kids are able to write their own computer programs instead of having to go to college for 12 years. It's what allowed cars to be assembled en masse. It's not a problem, and if it ever is, at least you have a 11,000 pages of text from the creators giving you a complete explanation.

erwan574 15y ago

A few books exist that try to restore some sort of "complete understanding" : Software programming starting from assembly language under linux : http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Ground-Up-Jonathan-Bartlett/dp/0975283847 http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Ground-Up-Jonathan-Bartlet... A study going from chip design to high level programming : http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Computing-Systems-Building-Principles/dp/026214087X http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Computing-Systems-Building-Pr... IHMO this "problem" of "incomplete vision" started when device drivers where introduced in general purpose OS. Professionnal application developpers started to target API instead of hardware. A milestone in this trend for me is Windows 3.0 (1990). This also marks the demise of fixed hardware computers that the hobbyist favored so far.