> But that was incredibly hard, and error prone (and comes with tonnes of limitations).
No, it wasn't. If it was incredible anything it was tedious. But nobody really expected anything super complex from you. Just look at the kinds of programs that were produced in 80s or 90s.
It would be incredibly hard today. Machines got very complex, operating systems got very complex.
But it wasn't so complex in 90s. I think I stopped writing assembly when I started using WINAPI because that was the point when assembly stopped being practical.
Sometimes I wonder how I would fare if I was 18yo again today and had to start in development and learn everything from scratch. I feel being able to learn everything as the technologies were evolving is a huge advantage I enjoy.
There’s a much vaster gulf between a truck driver and a truck engineer, vs a Java programmer and a programmer one layer below. Per your analogy, the truck driver is the program user here, not the program maintainer.
But that was incredibly hard, and error prone (and comes with tonnes of limitations). The fact that today, it's very easily possible to write working programs without knowing any of the underlying details, is a marvel.
If i were to hire a truck driver, i wouldn't expect to have to ask him to understand how the truck itself worked (e.g., fuel injection when he presses the accelerator). He only needs to know how to operate the truck from the interface (steering wheel!). Why isn't this the same for a java programmer?