Hm. So I think what's happened is that the tools have got better, which lowers the barrier to entry for many of the geek trades. Thus you get a set of people in the door who wouldn't have been there (say) five/ten years before.
This is both good and bad. Most of them are basically rubbish and can make the tools work well enough to foot the Solitaire-players out there, because they think it's all magic anyway. A few turn out to be very good and give the previous generation a kick up the arse because they ask hard questions like 'What's this makefile-vi-compiler shit? It's rubbish'. Most of the previous generation will go 'That's the way it is. I had to do it the hard way and I don't see why you shouldn't, etc.' Some will go 'Hm. Good point. Let's make it better.'
IIRC, it's been accepted wisdom for A While that you couldn't hand-craft machine code better than a good compiler and you were better off working further up the stack on, say, making better abstractions so that coders no longer have to cock about with registers and word-length. Unless they're hacking on space-probes in orbit around distant planets.
Anyway. Computers are actually rubbish. The hardware's cack, the OSes are worse, they're all entirely unfuckingreliable because New Features dreamed up by crackmonkeys at typewriters are more important than making existing stuff work and because most coders are doing that job because there are no longer large offices to employ them as clerks and because they're too dull to burn out like the good ones.
The only good computers are the ones you don't know you're using. Everything else is fucking awful and we should be collectively slightly ashamed about that.
On the other hand, bollocks to it. I am in work because computers are shit and the users are dim.
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Date: 2007-01-27 01:04 pm (UTC)This is both good and bad. Most of them are basically rubbish and can make the tools work well enough to foot the Solitaire-players out there, because they think it's all magic anyway. A few turn out to be very good and give the previous generation a kick up the arse because they ask hard questions like 'What's this makefile-vi-compiler shit? It's rubbish'. Most of the previous generation will go 'That's the way it is. I had to do it the hard way and I don't see why you shouldn't, etc.' Some will go 'Hm. Good point. Let's make it better.'
IIRC, it's been accepted wisdom for A While that you couldn't hand-craft machine code better than a good compiler and you were better off working further up the stack on, say, making better abstractions so that coders no longer have to cock about with registers and word-length. Unless they're hacking on space-probes in orbit around distant planets.
Anyway. Computers are actually rubbish. The hardware's cack, the OSes are worse, they're all entirely unfuckingreliable because New Features dreamed up by crackmonkeys at typewriters are more important than making existing stuff work and because most coders are doing that job because there are no longer large offices to employ them as clerks and because they're too dull to burn out like the good ones.
The only good computers are the ones you don't know you're using. Everything else is fucking awful and we should be collectively slightly ashamed about that.
On the other hand, bollocks to it. I am in work because computers are shit and the users are dim.