Computers Can Be Understood (2020)

Re:Computers Can Be Understood (2020) by menesss on Thursday April 14, 2022 @02:45AM (#31024032)

I tried very hard to steer an old colleague away from their "magical" view of computers, because at some point I aggregated enough experiences and insights to agree with the article's thesis. When working closely with hardware, there's no way around breaking that magic. I would even flavor that how it all "actually" works physically is cool and magical (in a we can compose magic way).

It was interesting to connect some of the issues they asked for help with relate back to this magic-fication.

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Re:Computers Can Be Understood (2020) by bluetomcat on Thursday April 14, 2022 @03:59AM (#31024397)

If an abstraction is good enough and fit for a particular problem, you can mostly treat it as magic, solve your problem at an upper layer and be done with it. Only when there is a mismatch between the problem domain and the available abstractions, you need to start jiggling through the layers and understand what problems each layer is trying to address.

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