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Comment by guhcampos | Hacker News Reader

It's an impressive, yet symptomatic feat.

With more and more people getting into coding and languages of higher and higher levels, less of us are turning to the lower levels of computer science. Lots of developers did not study CS at all and the ones who did mostly neglected the computer architecture classes - myself included.

Sometimes I stop and wonder that most of my low level compute knowledge comes as mere luck because I ended up working for the EDA industry for a few years. If I had not, I'd be a computer scientist with close to no understanding of how a computer actually works. We should all know our HDL's.

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Don't let yourself get too cynical! Development is becoming more accessible, and this is skewing the ratio.

I bet there are far more low level developers now than 30 years ago, however.

> I bet there are far more low level developers now than 30 years ago, however.

30 years ago every developer at least knew how bits and bytes with logic operations work.

Now, just any minimally proficient C/Cpp devs are genuinely hard to find. I may well say that there are less of them in total now.

C development community shrank a lot over the years.

Things went so bad that now some people suggest running whole web servers on MICROCONTROLLERS to just blink some LEDs!

> Things went so bad that now some people suggest running whole web servers on MICROCONTROLLERS to just blink some LEDs!

Why is that such a bad thing? Even microcontrollers are magnitudes more powerful than they were years ago, so why stick with other "simpler" methods when you can go with something more secure, easier to write and understand, and more "standard"?

I'm one of those people running webservers on microcontrollers (you'll hate this, but I program my esp8266 controllers in JavaScript!), and it seems silly to lament that. They are cheap (about $3 a piece to my door), power efficient (battery life is measured in months for the battery powered devices), and all of my code is about a dozen lines of simple code that allows me to integrate with the rest of my system.

Why save cycles today if you can borrow tomorrow?

Visual Basic (where many people didn't really know what variables were) existed 28 years ago. And it wasn't the first thing like that, by any means. Even 50 years ago, well, things like COBOL and MUMPS were fairly divorced from the details.

Well, I have a whole startup whose flagship hardware is based on web servers on microcontrollers, and our build costs and iteration times are trivial compared to our competitors.

Microcontrollers: cheap, reliable hardware. Web: cheap, reliable interface. Web programmers: cheap, numerous.

What's not to love?

You said yourself: minimally proficient C/Cpp devs are genuinely hard to find. HTTP GET with the program. ;)

Oh no... Don't tell me you are also on this train...

Seriously, you want your noodle vending machines to run a web server on an MCUs? I can't wait to see how eval escape will look on a vending machine.

Well, at least now you know whom to call when they will break =D

Heh, there's no way we'd expose that kind of interface, it's just internal plumbing. BTW we prefer the term service location to highlight the fact custom personalized meals are cooked direct from fresh ingredients within the machines, not simply 'dispensed' or 'vended' as "vending machines" as a concept has too many negative associations / too much cultural baggage.

> C development community shrank a lot over the years.

They're all in China and Korea churning out our cheap consumer hardware.

Most IoT devices with embedded web servers are running on relatively modest processors. The main barrier to running an embedded networking stack is RAM and that is abundant enough in cheap micros to make it a non-issue.

What I find fascinating is that Lisp, commonly perceived as too high level to be practical, is actually at its core (in its original implementations!) an incredibly low level language.

Really? One of the only things about Lisp and other functional languages that strive to be pure that trips me up is that I could not guess how to write a compiler for one, and especially with ample lazy evaluation I'm really not sure what the execution of a program would end up being in terms of the stream of instructions going through the CPU. When it comes to imperative coding, I at least have a fairly good idea, but with LISP I haven't the slightest idea. Does it create stack frames and do calls when recursing or does it simple 'emulate' it through maintaining its own stack? I could tell you what it's doing in terms of lambda calculus, or what it would be doing on the CPU if I had to write a Lisp 'emulator'... but what the actual Lisp runtime is doing, I've no idea!

Lisp isn't purely functional.

There are a bunch of books which explain how to write Lisp compilers. There are a bunch of different strategies.

> Does it create stack frames and do calls when recursing

That's what a typical Lisp might do. It might also change the stack frame and just jump to a function...

It's also relatively easy to check out, since Common Lisp has a built-in disassembler. One can take an implementation, compile a function and see the generated code. Just call the function DISASSEMBLE with a function object...

If you're interested, The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming winds up writing a Scheme interpreter in Scheme.

This is part of a proud and surprisingly long-standing tradition. The first Lisp interpreter was originally written in Lisp by one person, and then hand translated into assembly by another. This came as a surprise to the rest of the lab who had intended to work on an actual implementation in a year or two. You know, some time after they came up with a real syntax for it.

>my low level compute knowledge

But does it really make you better than other, very unlucky programmers, who doesn't have the "low level computer knowledge"? Does it make you the REAL programmer?

Because it's not. Because that's THE reason we have higher-level programming languages (and also lower-level ones) in the first place. Is computer just a black box to you? That's completely fine.

>computer scientist with close to no understanding of how a computer actually works

Which is how it's supposed to be.

Don't be such a gatekeeper.

> Lots of developers did not study CS at all

I do feel the same. A lot of "computer science" degrees are in fact just basic programming ones, and that often goes to masters, and rare cases PhD level degrees.

It is a common critic from industry that "computer science does not teach how to code," and I see too many universities seemingly taking it these days.

It is ironic how once computing science was once a road to unemployability and coding was all rife, but now companies don't want to hire people without degrees to do menial jobs like webdev.

Can we try to stop this gatekeeping and putting down some jobs as if they are "menial".

A lot of the webdev work I've done has been significantly more challenging and technically difficult than most of the C work I've done. That's not to say C is "easier", it's not, but it is different.

I've seen shitty devs in all areas, and I've worked menial jobs both in webdev and at the embedded C level (I had to write C code to display a custom font on a shitty LED display, that was easily the most boring job I've ever done).

i don't do web stuff because it's horrible frustrating and difficult. C is nice, i love it as it matches the pc platform and you can debug it normally etc. A lot of people like to hate on 'frontent developers' or 'full stack javascript developers' or w/e but you are right. whatever floats your boat will be 'better' and 'more logical' than whatever sinks your ship. for me thank sinking is caused by scipring and CSS. for others that might be C.

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