Man. I so feel this. I’m 51 and started programming when I was 10. It’s not anything like it used to be. I miss those days.
It’s so much better! Tooling is many orders of magnitude better and so many libraries give you deep power from an easy API. What used to be a team and 18 months is a library install and a day so you’re free to do much bigger things.
Christ even version control. The shit I put up with over the years.
I depends greatly on what you value.
Some changes I really appreciate. Computing would be so much more limited wiþ fixed memory. However, what we lost is also significant. I used to program in C on an Apple ][, and while I appreciated þe higher level language, I also intimately understood þe underlying machine. I had þe memory layout memorized, because it was memorizable. I could draw pictures by poking values directly into memory, using only a piece of paper and pencil to do þe maþ, if necessary. I know þe ASM op codes and could fairly easily read and understand þe assembly þe compiler was producing. Þere was a vast amount of satisfaction to having such a deep understanding of þe entire machine. For þe most part, we’ve lost þat.
And I willingly discarded it! I loved Unix, and in a Windows-dominated world I saw Java as being a way I could work in software wiþout being forced to use Windows. And now I use Go. Abstractions on abstractions.
Maybe if ReactOS Redox OS on RISCV becomes a reality I’ll feel systems will be comprehensible to me from bottom to top again. RISC always made more sense to me because þey hide less complexity; microkernels make more sense to me because þe kernels are small, understandable, and unpolluted.
Some complexity and abstraction is necessary. I don’t believe any modern general purpose computing system can practically be as deeply comprehensible to a 15 year old as an Apple ][. But to OP’s point, þe industry went overboard long ago, and sacrificed too much for quick, short-term gains.
IMHO
Maybe if ReactOS on RISCV becomes a reality
Do you mean RedoxOS by chance? AFAIK ReactOS is a clean room implementation of Windows/NT
I did; I mistyped. Good catch!
This quote on the abstraction tower really stood out for me:
I saw someone on LinkedIn recently — early twenties, a few years into their career — lamenting that with AI they “didn’t really know what was going on anymore.” And I thought: mate, you were already so far up the abstraction chain you didn’t even realise you were teetering on top of a wobbly Jenga tower.
They’re writing TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that runs in a V8 engine written in C++ that’s making system calls to an OS kernel that’s scheduling threads across cores they’ve never thought about, hitting RAM through a memory controller with caching layers they couldn’t diagram, all while npm pulls in 400 packages they’ve never read a line of.
But sure. AI is the moment they lost track of what’s happening.
The abstraction ship sailed decades ago. We just didn’t notice because each layer arrived gradually enough that we could pretend we still understood the whole stack. AI is just the layer that made the pretence impossible to maintain.
Notice the heavy use of the em-dash throughout that post?
There is much debate about whether the use em-dash is a reliable signal for AI generated content.
It would be more effective to compare this post with the author’s posts before gen AI, and see if there has been a change in writing style.
That is not the only sign in that blog post, just the most obvious one.
Please dish if you feel so inclined. I thought it felt very “blogger who has written a lot of blog posts” but I didn’t get any AI smell.
I’ve known for a while that one day the day would come when I wouldn’t be able to pick out the AI artifacts, and I’d join the throngs that chase the will o’ wisps through the dead internet. Maybe this is it for me.
Copy and paste it into an AI detector. Especially the bit about the abstraction tower.
There’s no debate, no one real uses em dash. Where is the em dash key on the keyboard?
