>people were making the exact same arguments about them. That not knowing your API to the core makes you a bad programmer.

And they were correct. You're entirely right that this time it isn't different, but in the sense that the quality of both developers and code has been going downhill for decades. The only thing that has kept this industry alive is that hardware got more performant faster than developers became more inept.

The non-strawman version of Socrates warning, that writing-based cultures would lose memory, take recorded fact at face value and mistake knowledge for wisdom was true as well. Your post is an example of this, you read something about Socrates, you didn't investigate and were fine with the appearance of knowledge, and because books can't defend themselves you mistook that for understanding.

That's what he was concerned about, hordes of people with a vague assemblage of facts but no genuine capacity to critically think.

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newswasboring a day ago | parent [-]

I am not arguing that things don't change and certain skills dont atrophy. I am arguing that the atrophied skills are compensated by new skills we develop. But your personal attack makes me feel like your purpose is to win, not to be right.

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Barrin92 a day ago | parent [-]

>I am arguing that the atrophied skills are compensated by new skills we develop

is there a lot of evidence for this? You can broadly put technology into two camps. Technologically that, as it becomes more powerful, demands more attention and skill from the user and just the opposite. A bow is more powerful than a stick but also more demanding to use. A car is more powerful than your feet but your population ends up obese. Almost every single piece of software, with the exception of maybe debuggers, who an astonishingly amount of seasoned developers do not utilize (I suspect for that reason), is a car and not a bow.

There's a study on English college students roughly ten years ago who were tasked to read the first few paragraphs of Dicken's Bleak House. They were even allowed to use a dictionary and the internet. A majority could not interpret the text. That's where we were at before LLMs. My rural working-class grandfather at an underfunded Catholic school had to translate Ovid from Latin into German in 8th grade. It wasn't even a personal attack, we're just this fried now.

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newswasboring 13 hours ago | parent [-]

You are equating governance failures with technological ones. At one hand you are asking me to prove how technology like writing or cars are useful but on the other hand you are bemoaning people's declining reading abilities. What even is your point?

	▲	Barrin92 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		that's not what I said at all. I pointed out that there are technologies that facilitate human development, and there are technologies that stunt and replace it, say a car. What I was asking was is: If it's true as you say that we have replaced our atrophied skills with other ones, what are some of those, or technologies that facilitate them? Be that governmental, social or otherwise. Because we have a decline in reading, a decline in physical ability, a decline in sociality, to the topic of the thread a decline in the quality of software and engineers, but very little to show for it in my book.