[vcf-midatlantic] OT: people don't understand computers anymore

[Dave McGuire]

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