Daily Archives: 2023-10-21

We have used too many levels of abstractions

Source: Hacker News

Article note: There was a 2012 interview with Bill Joy (Sun, vi, etc.) and Danny Hillis (Thinking Machines, Long Now, etc.) where they talk about this idea as "The Coming Entanglement" and it keeps being...right. https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/the-coming-entanglement-bill-joy-an-12-02-15/ It's certainly the case that from an educational standpoint, the computing folks that grew up in the 2nd half of the 20th century mostly have pretty deep constructed models of computers because they encountered computers they could understand at an age when they had the time and plasticity to understand them, and _had_ to understand if they wanted to do things (Want sound? Go 3 rounds with your IRQ setup to get that stupid sound card to work! Want multiplayer games? Guess who's building out a network and setting up port forwarding if you're lucky enough to have broadband...). The under 30 set came up with computer-as-magic-mirror, where the interfaces were carefully constructed to not expose any model of its internal function, and the internals are so complicated that even experts can't remotely fit the whole thing in their head. AND the set of students is much less tilted toward enthusiasts, many of the CS/CPE/EE students arriving at universities are there because they were told they're expected to go obtain a college degree and those disciplines seem like a relatively easy way to land a high paying career, not because of any preexisting interest or proclivity. ....and it causes a lot of problems NOW because the people doing the curriculum design started from a much richer model and higher proportion of preexisting enthusiasts than the current crop of students, and LATER because we don't have enough engineers with enough skills and perspective to see us through the next set of problems.
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