Comment by SoftwareMaven
13 years ago
Why is that a bad thing (aside from the "I had to walk uphill both ways through the snow" aspect)?
A significant portion of this generation doesn't understand CPUs and buses. They wouldn't have been able to write anything remotely complex 20 years ago). That doesn't seem to be hindering things much, though. There are still system programmers out there who dive into it, but our abstractions have gotten good enough that all programmers don't need to understand the details to be successful.
(FWIW, I am conflicted on this topic. I wrote a little more here[1].)
CPUs and buses have been abstracted away pretty successfully by now, especially if you use a high-level language. But I can't imagine that the same will happen to file systems, at least not in the next 10 years. Too many of our critical tools, like all version control systems, depend on knowing where in the file system hierarchy your stuff is stored. Even if your IDE hides that from you, you'll need to know where to look as soon as something goes wrong. And things go wrong at the file system level a lot more often than they do at the CPU level.
Really? iOS has very effectively abstracted away the filesystem at a consumer level. I don't see it as much of a jump to see that occurring at the programming level, at least for application-level coding.
Obviously, there will always be a need for a class of programmers who are intimately familiar with the lowest levels, but that set of programmers will always be vastly smaller than the numbers of those who code line-of-business applications, etc...
"Really? iOS has very effectively abstracted away the filesystem at a consumer level."
the operative phrase is "for consumers", I'm not going to be programming on an IPad ever.
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