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Comment by aa-jv | Hacker News Reader

Those of us who grew up with computers are truly a special breed, since we had to know how things work in order to do anything at all with the things.

These days kids are served eyeball-bleeding chaos on the supercomputers in their pocket, which they need permission to do anything else with .. and its kind of sad.

Learn what a byte is, kids. Learn where it fits into a register and why. Learn a few opcodes, some peripheral I/O heuristics. Break out that raspberry Pi and go full bare metal for a month.

I sure wish our mobile phones had compilers onboard. This is the one thing that is ruining computing for kids these days, imho. They need corporation-controlled permission, for fucks sake.

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I 100% agree with you, but as a person who came up in the tail end of the generation we’re discussing (we bought a bargain bin TI-99/4a at K-Mart) and also a faculty member who has been teaching young people how to program for the last ten years, I can tell you that the overwhelming response they have to your exhortation is “WHY?” The current crop of computer users is basically everybody, and the current crop of CS students has primarily been motivated by well-paying jobs [1]. So really, if you want to get through to them, you have to motivate why they should care about bits and bytes in the first place.

Astonishingly, the Jobsian “bicycle for the mind” idea failed. Almost nobody now buys a computer to scratch an itch. They buy a computer (smartphone) to keep in touch with friends and family and to sometimes play games. The idea that software is a service that you pay for has been totally normalized. I find that it takes an entire semester of “imagine if!” scenarios before students start to catch on that WOW THIS IS AN AMAZING MACHINE! Some of them never get it. By analogy it’s like being upset at somebody in the 1970’s for blithely using their telephone without even stopping to consider what a fucking miracle the modern telephone system was. They would just stare at you like you have two heads.

I don’t really know how to change this, but I feel like this is the central battle in the fight us scientists and nerds need to fight in order to get the world to give a shit… about anything.

[1] this may be changing

I think "why" is a good question. And frankly for 99.9% of people the answer is "no reason".

One has to differentiate between "computers as a tool" and "creating computers".

I drive a car. It's good transport. If it breaks I take it to a mechanic. If I bash it I take it to a panel beater. I don't care about engine specs. It's a tool to do a job.

100 years ago if you owned a car you also had to be a mechanic. My father built his own car. Enthusiasts will wax lyrical for hours on engine upgrades.

In the same way, when I was young, the market for computers was basically the "creatives". There wasn't much software to buy. Most (PC) computers got built from parts. You could swap out each part at a time. You set IRQs manually. Good times.

But those products didn't suit the everyman. That only happens in the late 90s. Since then most users are "consumers" not creative.

The creatives still have lots of tools to learn (more than I did). But they will never be more than a tiny tiny fraction of the population.

This exact phenomenon is, I believe, as a result of the separation of the compiler tools from the operating system. If the iPhone generation were able to write software for the iPhone, with the iPhone, there wouldn't be such a vacuum "Why?" being asked by your students .. they'd have tons of examples of great stuff they could do, without requiring permission, with the supercomputers in their pocket.

Its just that entire generations have evolved now to treat their computers as commoditized services - as you noted - and don't understand that they could, as users, program the thing themselves.

Our industry has rigorously enforced hierarchical structures in place to make sure this doesn't happen, and it sucks.

This is why I believe we should not be teaching comp-sci students with modern computers. We should start out by teaching them to program old computers, first - and then let them catch up with the current market in the last few years of their studies.

> which they need permission to do anything else with

Not really. You can run pretty much anything you want if you build for the web.

Then thats using other peoples computers. I want to use my computer, for my purposes. That needs permission.

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