Christian Liendo via vcf-midatlantic writes:
I liken the general lack of knowledge about the inner working of computers to the general lack of knowledge of automobile internals
Thank you I was going to use the same analogy.
It's because they've become an appliance. You don't need to know how TV works to watch it and, in the same vein, you don't need to know how a computer works to use it either. Also, the GUI -- guarantee user ignorance -- has, IMNSHO, done much to remove the user from the system. And then, there's the education system. Kids come out of college without any understanding of how to program but, oh boy, they know all of the syntactical nuances of the latest trendy language. Assembly programming should be one of their mandatory classes. There, they will need to think through creation of an algorithm using basic computer functions. Me? I was an EE. Never to any programming classes. It was expected of us to learn it to solve EE problems. I really see no merit to teaching some programming lingo but I do see merit in developing a logical/programming mindset to get from point A (input) the pot B (output).