[kristopolous]

Things used to require much more competency.

For instance, I've been looking at old Byte Magazine issues on archive.org

Let's take November 1982. Here's an article on building a video digitizer (https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-11/page/n175/...) complete with circuit diagrams, signal examples, and a control program in 6502 assembly.

Hobbyist magazine. For enthusiasts.

If I had a candidate that did things like that for fun I'd hire them before getting their name.

Dev work has gotten too abstract and covered in bullshit.

Not that 6502 assembler is useful in 2022, but computers were a focused study that would result in productive capacity. For whatever reason that's been diffused and our attention is spent less fruitfully.

[nathanaldensr]

> Dev work has gotten too abstract and covered in bullshit.

That's a reflection of modern business (especially tech).

[nonethewiser]

Quite intentionally so. The more that its abstracted (well) the more accessible it is. Compare assembly to python.

With AI tools I think there will be a similar if not greater distance between python and something else.

[kristopolous]

No it's not.

It's an hourglass where the width is accessibility and the height is abstraction. In the center is the sweet spot. Basic was near there. Pascal probably was. Ruby, PHP and Python are capable of being there...

As an example outside of computers, think about highly abstract art, highly abstract philosophy or poetry.

It comes across as obdurate and diffusive, aloof and needlessly distanced from materiality.

Now in programming you see the same thing. Abstract language that seems to exist in pure vapor. Factory, interface, provider, service, oh and a provider service and a service provider which are not the same things of course.

All these things mean very specific things that change depending on whose lips are moving - they're defined in code somewhere - they do something deterministic - there is a real materialist function here that's being obscured by confusing language. We've entered the age of Jurgen Habermas style programming.

It's fine if you want that, but don't pretend it's successfully easier to understand when poorly, vaguely, and also precisely defined.

The computer is a picky, unrelenting, uncompromising bratty jerk. Because of this programming concepts are best when they're nailed the fuck down and not dancing around in some abstract freeform jazz space pretending that it's more accessible that way.

All it does is create confusion and the emotion of confidence replacing the reality of competence. The computer is still going to be a bastard and we'll have to deal with it eventually.

[ourmandave]

Today would you look for someone who grew up doing Rasberry Pi builds?

I haunted Radio Shack back in the day, but would have loved to grow up doing single board computer stuff.

[musingsole]

Raspberry Pi hobbyists are great in the IoT world. Almost an immediate hire if you can demonstrate an image recognition app.

[noobermin]

Was about to upvote then you said 6502 asm isn't useful in 2022... If anything, learning 6502 asm is instructive because it isn't very abstract but forces you to turn abstract thinking to explicit instructions.

[blep_]

Any assembly language gets you the same thing, and 6502 assembly is likely not the one your current machine understands natively.

(if it is, I would like to read your blog)

[noobermin]

6502 is so bare bones, that programming it even over things like x86 is instructive, it really forces you (or it does for me) to think hard about doing things, even mundanely "easy" things that people who only program C say are fast and low level.

But anyway, it's not "useful" for actual everyday work, it's more of a nice challenge that keeps your mind sharp.

And for my c64, ah I need time to solder stuff so it can connect to another machine, much less the internet ;) one of these days...

[layer8]

A possible benefit of 6502 assembly is that the instruction set is relatively simple. And you get to implement stuff like multiplication. ;)