|
|
|
|
|
|
by perucoder
3881 days ago
|
|
|
This is a taste of the future. More and more people are creating things using tools and frameworks but not really understanding the underlying concepts. When I pick up a bookshelf at IKEA and put it together, I don't start calling myself a carpenter because of it. |
|
|
In my first programming job, there were a few senior programmers who were then in their 50s, meaning they started programming in the 70s (before microcomputers). In those days, the way you became a programmer was to major in electrical engineering. That's why even now, a number of top universities (MIT, Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Rice) have combined departments of "electrical engineering and computer science".
How many C++ and Java programmers these days know how to work their way around NAND gates, digital logic, and RCI circuits? How many know how a transistor works? How many know how to build a mux in hardware, or an adder, or what's in a RAM cell?
I'm sure there are some, but by and large, I think it's an improvement that we don't think about digital logic and binary representations when we write our program. The cycle of moving up the abstraction hierarchy has been going on since high-level languages were invented in the 50s. Today's tools and frameworks are the low-level building blocks of tomorrow.