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Comment by raheemm | Hacker News Reader

#7. Learn the layers. Is this even possible anymore? Seems like with apis, frameworks, there are layers upon layers just within code. Then you have the OS, the hardware, the network layer (whoa! 7 layers right there!)...

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A big part of this is actually learning some hardware and networking basics. If you understand how CPUs and memory works, if you understand how TCP/IP works, if you understand how compilers (or JIT/GC environments) work, you can reason out a lot of functionality that will cut across all sorts of frameworks. Otherwise, you get back to #1, where you are doing stuff but you don't really know why it works.

It appears to me that a lot of folks are actually incapable of stopping and thinking how stuff might even plausibly work. As soon as you rephrase the question in terms of fundamentals, it becomes clear, but people allow themselves to get confused by all the high-level whizbang stuff, without remembering that there is no magic.

Well, you are referring to Wheeler's Corollary to Lampson's Law, but it doesn't have to be like that. It's actually less work to just write the program you want in the base language, than trying to shoehorn it into a framework, or wrestle the framework around your code.

I've recently rediscovered the joy of writing GEM apps in m68k ASM...

For people's information:

"All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection." - Butler Lampson

And, from what limited sources I could find:

"[above] ... Except for the problem of too many layers of indirection" - David Wheeler

It's a shame Wheeler isn't better known. He invented the subroutine back in the '50s. Calling a subroutine used to be called a "Wheeler jump" (relevant to #4 in TFA).

His group with the EDSAC did some absolutely tremendous and groundbreaking work.

Wilkes, Wheeler, and Gill wrote a book, "Preparation of programs for an electronic digital computer", that pretty much describes the core software engineering precepts we use today - in 1951.

Gill wrote "The Diagnosis of Mistakes in Programmes on the EDSAC", which gives a good snip of what they were doing at the time. I think that it can be obtained for free online.

We need to educate people that there was computing before the advent of Web 2.0. There are riches in the past to be mined by those who will take their blindfolds off.

As a sysadmin, I used to abhor levels of abstraction. As a new dev, I love it. Esp after I started using jquery. :)

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