Re:Not all young people are ‘digital natives’
by alexpetralia on Saturday March 14, 2020 @05:02PM
(#22578662)
I initially sympathized with this line of thinking, but someone recently convinced me otherwise. The logic is as follows:
* Do programmers still fool around with Cobol or Assembly or Fortran? Not so much
* How important is C nowadays? Yes - everything runs on it - but that is because for the most part it is rock solid, and we need fewer and fewer C developers
* The set of "primitives" required has moved up a layer of abstraction. New skills include: website builders, data pipelines, infra-as-code, cloud infra, web frameworks, etc.
If people are still hacking the same way as they were 20 and 30 years ago, that is a problem. Yes, the hacking today surely looks different than it did decades ago - the primitives are larger and higher leverage - but there is hacking all the same.
* Do programmers still fool around with Cobol or Assembly or Fortran? Not so much
* How important is C nowadays? Yes - everything runs on it - but that is because for the most part it is rock solid, and we need fewer and fewer C developers
* The set of "primitives" required has moved up a layer of abstraction. New skills include: website builders, data pipelines, infra-as-code, cloud infra, web frameworks, etc.
If people are still hacking the same way as they were 20 and 30 years ago, that is a problem. Yes, the hacking today surely looks different than it did decades ago - the primitives are larger and higher leverage - but there is hacking all the same.