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> I don't know about today, but 15 years ago you couldn't be considered programmer without knowing that much at least. It's surprising to hear that it is consid
by cbd1984 12y ago
> I don't know about today, but 15 years ago you couldn't be considered programmer without knowing that much at least. It's surprising to hear that it is considered deep.
60 years ago, you couldn't be a programmer without knowing the exact binary code of every opcode your machine executed, and how all of the peripherals worked at the lowest possible level.
Back then, of course, all programs were trivially small to fit in hilarious amounts of memory and mass storage, and graphical programming was a specialized topic, to put it mildly. Networking in the form we know it now flatly didn't exist.
I'm not convinced that the amount of knowledge programmers know has changed, but the kind of knowledge surely has.
- ufmace 12y agoThat makes me think of the 1986 vintage Mac SE sitting on one of my tables, more as a decoration than anything. It's new enough that it's almost sorta kinda possible to get it on the internet, yet also old enough that it's somewhere between an adventure and a PITA to do so, and pretty challenging to do anything vaguely useful with it once you do. I don't know as much about the nitty gritty details as I'd like, but it's damn cool that I can now write 1 line of Ruby that fires off a query at a web server somewhere, gets a JSON reply, parses it into a Hash, and delivers it back to me, doing roughly a kazillion hugely complex things along the way. It lets us all spend a lot more time building things that are useful to customers instead of scrounging around with bits, fun as that can be sometimes.