[norir]

> I recognize that it is reminiscent of a few decades ago when old timers complained about the proliferation of high level programming languages and insisted they would lead to a generation of programmers lacking a proper understanding of how the system behaves beneath all that syntactic sugar and automatic garbage collection. They won’t have the foundational skills necessary to design and build quality software. And, for the most part, they turned out to be wrong.

What if the old timers were actually right? I tend to think they were.

[yason]

The things is, they were and they were not.

It's absolutely necessary that there's a line of people somewhere who will understand the path from garbage collection to assembly instructions. We can't build upon abstractions only as long as we still run stuff on physical cpus.

But it's also unequivocally true that once we have enough long-bearded oldtimers and newtimers who do understand how writing a Python expression somewhere will end up with a register write elsewhere all the others just don't — have to.

In old times, all you had was hardware and to program you had to understand hardware. But those who then did program and did understand were the few smart people who had access to hardware. Everyone else was left out. Now we have high-level languages, scripting languages, AI, what else. As long as we can maintain the link to hardware by some people, the rest can build on that.

[gitaarik]

Yeah people in the past were always more right. The people that built the first processors were much more aware of low level stuff than those so called low level programmers with their fancy compilers.

And before them, the electrical and mechanical engineers, without them we wouldn't even have these processors. We all ultimately are dependent on them.

And like that you can go on and on