[rhooke]

What makes you think that will happen? A lot of young people I know seem to understand just as little about computers as the older ones, on average.

Younger people use technology a lot, but what is being used tends to require much less understanding of any of the underlying tech. The level of abstraction is a lot higher now.

[WalterBright]

So true. They laugh at me 'cuz I know nothing about the latest app. I laugh at them because they have no idea how their computer works.

How many times do I advise: "Just unplug it and plug it back in."

P.S. for non-digital electronics, the cold reset doesn't work.

P.P.S. My skill at writing programs took an enormous discontinuous leap forward when I learned how transistors worked, how to wire up a transistor to make a flip flop, and how to hook up flip flops to make registers, adders, etc.

[bryanrasmussen]

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic is generally used to talk about how it works for a less developed civilization meeting a more developed one, but perhaps it also pertains to the non technicians in the magic civilization.

At a certain point of specialization and advancement it no longer seems productive use of your time to try to understand it, leading to large portions of the population who view the technicians holding things together as inscrutable magicians.

[jart]

It'll happen incrementally. Each time the lawyer ruling class does something bad, like build a website that doesn't work, they'll need to give us a little more power in order to save them. Then after a long enough timeline, we'll win, and legal code will be executable.

[elliekelly]

I’m not sure it’ll work out this way because a lawyer can become a coder much easier than a coder can become a lawyer. Then again, lawyers are notoriously allergic to all-things-technology, so who knows.

[oblio]

> Then after a long enough timeline, we'll win, and legal code will be executable.

Awesome, I was looking forward to Kafka running on EC2 instances.

[oblio]

And I meant Kafka as in Kafkaesque, not Apache Kafka.