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djeastm 4 hours ago

Any thoughts on what the next generation of software devs is going to look like without as much manual experience?

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eloisant 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

When C arrived, programmers wonder how software devs would look like when they won't have assembly experience.

Then the same happened with languages that managed memory.

And with IDE that could refactor your code in a click and autocomplete API calls.

And with Stack Overflow where people copy/pasted code they didn't understand.

	▲	bGl2YW5j 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I reckon there's a limit to how long this abstraction can go on before not understanding underlying mechanisms will seriously hamstring you.
	▲	AnimalMuppet 24 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		It started before that. When assemblers came out, (some) programmers worried about losing touch with the machine if they didn't have to know the instructions in octal.
	▲	calvinmorrison 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		And over and over time proves that, when you need it, ASM or C or generals system knowledge was handy. One example, I am not a "Windows" or "NT" guy, mostly working in various Unixes and Linux in my professional career. I had a client who had battered every resource trying to fix some horrible freeze/timeout in their application. So I rolled up my sleeves, first search " is there dtrace on windows", found some profiling tools, found the process was stuck in some dumb blocking call loop, resource was unavailable, and the rest was history. So yeah i mean - who cares how it works - but also if you have experience in how things _do_ work you can solve problems other people cannot.

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_doctor_love 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Honestly, I think it will look pretty much like this one. There’s a lot of manual experience that the current generation doesn’t have.

For example, I haven’t racked and cabled a server in over 15 years. That used to be a valuable skill.

I also used to know how to operate Cisco switches and routers (on the original IOS!). I haven't thought about CIDR and the difference between a /24 and a /30 since the year 2008. A class IP addresses, how do those work? What subnet am I on? Is thing running on a different VLAN? Irrelevant to me these days. Some people still know it! But not as many as in the past.

The late Dr. Richard Hamming observed that once a upon a time, "a good man knew how to implement square root in machine code." If you didn't know how to do that, you weren't legit. These days nobody would make such a claim.

So some skills fade and others rise. And also, software has moved in predictable cycles for many decades at this point. We are still a very young field but we do have some history at this point.

So things will remain the same the more they change on that front.

	▲	calvinmorrison 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> So some skills fade and others rise. And also, software has moved in predictable cycles for many decades at this point. We are still a very young field but we do have some history at this point. And there'll be a split too... like there's a giant divide between those mechanics who used to work on carburetors and the new gen with microcontrollers, injection systems, etc. People who think cars are 'too complicated' aren't wrong, but for someone who grew up in the injected era, i vastly prefer debugging issues over the canbus rather than snaking my ass around a hot exhaust to check something.