I've been working with a Kiwi for a bit now. He grew up on the only 'computer' in NZ back in the 70's, a punch card machine that he had to actually fight (with real fists he says) to use time on. This guy has seen the digital revolution up close.

There was an article on HN a while back that mentioned the #1 programming language being taught today was Python. I told the Kiwi this and he just sighed. Python is a 'batteries included' type language. You don't have to really worry about any memory issues, any special loops that will go to infinity, none of the real stuff. Yes, it teaches you the 'idea' of programming, but programming is much more than an idea, it is a set of instructions you send to an electrical machine to preform a task. If you take away the entirety of the actual physical world, you have done the kids a disservice. Programming, real programming, is not supposed to be easy.

I'll mention the Kiwi was here in the US on a work holiday. I was trying to get a chip working (yes, with actual registers) and spent ~6 months on it. The Kiwi, I kid you not, spent about 3 hours. The guy really did know his stuff.

> none of the real stuff

It's really good to know how things works underneath, but insisting that constantly messing with low-level details is "real" programming (and implying high-level details aren't "real") is weird. Both aspects - high and low-level - are important.

Beginners are taught high-level languages because it's easy to start with - one could create something useful without learning lots of things. If they care about their craft, eventually they will learn all the gory details of the stack underneath down to bare metal - an occasions (bugs, weird behaviors or just curiosity) where, say, Python programmer is invited to go and peek under the hood of their interpreter or libc or kernel or even hardware happens every now and then.

Unless all that pythonista's doing is bashing some boring CRUDs with Django. Then, a knowledge of low-level stuff seems almost unnecessary. But, hey, someone has to do that kind of programming, too.

>We seem to be increasingly moving toward such an era

You should visit a Maker Faire. I can't think of anything that restores my faith in humanity quite as much as a day at one.

I very much doubt that people are less sophisticated about science and technology than any time before. Quite a contrary, the education system has given us laymen discussions in which scientific literature is referred regularly (HN, many popular subreddits, even discussion threads in my Facebook stream)

Due to a lack of man hours available to teachers, we make up for breadth instead of depth. This is a good thing, as we do not know going forward what we should teach in depth to children. Teaching kids about cam shafts and carburators would be a fools errand, but you only knew that about 5 years ago. However, depth is needed in many areas, we just have to trust people to figure that out on their own, as they are more mobile than an educational system. An example is bit wise operations in computers. Many don't have a clue as to how to use a register in a chip, and we thought we'd never have to again. But encrypting, securely, relies entirely on this and trying to poke holes in it. Now, again, we need the depth there to maintain encryption as a viable idea.

I don't have numbers either, but I think that we are continuing to specialize. We have an ever increasing portion of the population understand technology, but any given technology can be used by many and understood by few.

Idiocracy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy) is also based on that idea.

Pump Six is a great story about this kind of future.