Comment by josephg
1 day ago
> Perhaps the most interesting thing is that RISC-V shows just how ISA agnostic people are
Of course! Most people in the computing world work way higher up the ladder of abstraction. I suspect a small minority of working software engineers know what an ISA even is.
I did some contract work in web development for a time. It is staggering how few people understand how the javascript they write gets executed on the machine. People don't understand pointers, or virtual machines, or in many cases how JS bundlers work, despite using them daily.
In some ways, this is a sign that our abstraction layers have been a great success! People can program for the virtual javascript machine, without needing to understand how the actual machine works, or how it emulates javascript. Is this the future we wanted? I'm not sure. But it's here.
Definitely. I’m a weird software guy that got a hardware degree in college so that I could understand all the low level stuff. I remember there was a joint project with the hardware (ECE) and software (CS) students to build a simple computer with bit slice and microcode and program it to do something (I forget what). I remember the software students being bewildered that there was no division instruction in these systems (because who needs that when you have shifts and add/subtract). Nowadays, with so much stuff running in browsers, the average software engineer has no clue what the hardware is doing.
What's next? Programming Javascript without understanding Javascript??
That's not next...it's now. Through at least LLMs and languages that compile to JS.