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Comment by throwaway47292 | Hacker News Reader

It seems we are moving to a world of magic, where developers will be alchemists, and only a handful of people will understand "physics" or "chemistry" and know what is actually going on in the cloud, serverless, fileless, functionless development.

Since google translate and google maps, I always ask myself, what is the real price for this very convenient and engaging product.

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Haven’t we been in that world for a while now? Some of what used to be deep magic becomes shallow magic, accessible to far more people, while the magic that enables it becomes a deeper, darker art. I also don’t think this is particularly unique to computing, except insofar as computing is inherently more accessible than other technologies.

This is the nature of tools, specialization, and how industries mature. This is the evolution of software eating the world -- now it's also eating development itself.

I see this happening a lot with the young engineers. Very few of them really know what's happening under the hoods.

Does anybody really know anything which goes on under the hood, all the way down to transistors? I think it is half a century since this was even possible for a single person.

haha maybe Christopher Domas knows :D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmTwlEh8L7g [x86 god mode]

but there is a difference between knowing vaguely how internal combustion engine works versus treating your car as a magic box from the future. (which of course now most cars are, you can not even disable the tire pressure alert after you pump your tires without going to the service shop)

I fear that nobody will even teach the fetch-execute cycle to our kids.

https://nandgame.com is a great introduction to such stuff. But that is just a single layer. The problem with computing is not that the individual layers are difficult to understand, is it the sheer amount of layers.

I follow the rule of thumb that you should understand the layer you are working at, and one layer below. Understanding all they layers is great, but will take you a lifetime.

Nandgame is awesome. really like the new levels. Adding the relay level made it more grounded in reality and the maze is fun.

A degree in Computer Science should teach you most of those things.

You can learn very decent overview of all the layers in a single weekend watching Youtube videos. It's only the deep expertise that takes time, as it always has.

I am pretty much sure engineers from late 70s said the same for young engineers. Same for the engineers from 80s for those in 90s. And the trend continues. I think servers becomes the new processors and the abstraction gets higher and higher.

It is the nature of evolution whether you like it or not.

that is of course true

but now we are at a day where "Amazon to remove more content that violates rules from cloud service" is on the front of hackernews together with "Visual Studio Code now available as Web based editor for GitHub repos"

evolution or not, i will revolt, if i think the path its taking is harmful. (not that i can do much besides teaching my kid to know how computers work haha)

True, I agree with you and you have all the rights to revolt. But let's say you have an opinion, instead of revolting I would say you should push it on the world and let the world decision whether they agree with you or not. What Amazon and Google is doing is, they are enforcing their opinion by luring you into their eco system. That's one way to make the world compliant to your opinions.

Just revolting in your own universe doesn't get the job of changing the course of evolution.

i used revolt to be more dramatic :)

i meant i will take action against the evolution, and one of the things i can do is spend as much time as i can in educating my daughter.

Doesn't change anything. It's still a problem till you've to support something that is crucial and only few people know about it.

Otherwise we'll end up recalling the retired programmers that know cobol because nobody else can fix it anymore.

While true, it also depends pretty much on the quality of what the university was teaching during those 3 to 5 years of engineering degree.

> I think servers becomes the new processors

Aren't we talking about "SaaS services outside of your control" here?

That is why a proper engineering degree should cover all levels.

While I learned assembly language and machine code and a tiny bit of electrical engineering in school over 20 years ago, and I think it was helpful to have a basic understanding of how computers work at that level... I don't remember the details, and certainly haven't had to use them in my career as a programmer, and you don't really need to understand this stuff to be a solid programmer.

Computers are devices for abstracting, always have been.

If we had to understand everything down to do anything, we'd still be at the punchcard stage of computing, and not doing anything more sophisticated than was done then.

Just like "scientist" and "engineer" have fractured into many specialist disciplines, the same is happening (and has happened many times before; when's the last time you wrote assembly?) in the disciplines of "computer science" and "computer engineering".

There will still need to be experts to continue the building and maintenance of services; however, not everyone designing web sites or doing data analytics needs to know in intricate detail the underpinnings of their tools.

VSCode in the browser is available as a standalone server [in case you need to deploy it in your ways]: https://github.com/cdr/code-server

License: MIT

It works insanely well.

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