[vcf-midatlantic] OT: people don't understand computers anymore
Dave McGuire
mcguire at neurotica.com
Tue Jun 7 14:25:23 EDT 2016
On 06/07/2016 02:03 PM, Bill Sudbrink via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
> It's a bit astonishing to me too. We get job candidates
> with CS degrees from reputable universities who don't
> know what a register is, can't explain how basic sorts
> work or why you would even want to know. In my opinion,
> the most evil phrase to come out of a software engineer's
> mouth is "I don't want to have to think about...". Yup,
> it's all abstracted away. You get a "container class"
> with "iterators" and "find" methods and you're all set.
> Not fast enough? Throw more hardware at it.
>
> This is raising my blood pressure... gotta stop.
I know exactly how you feel. The shift toward this type of thinking
has been building for a long time. It's exactly why I moved entirely
into embedded systems development, where we still code in assembler a
lot of the time, and we still know how computers actually work and how
code actually gets executed.
And for people who think this shift is a "good thing": Bullshit. This
is the sort of "progress" that landed us in a position where an
operating system requires billions of bytes of RAM just to boot. Get
some perspective and look at the bigger picture.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
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