Alcun Atirutan BBS

programming has become almost entirely about remembering the right combination of inputs to get someone else's shitty program to do what you want instead of just writing the program that does what you want

@deprecated_ii You do understand that you don't have to comply with these mores, don't you? When I worked in Linux, it was even considered a mark of an astute programmer to know when "to open code", as it was called, and when to use an existing primitive.

@teknomunk @pro @CathodeRayGun People also aren't any good at writing something from scratch if they never do it, so the fraction of programmers who can is small and getting smaller

@deprecated_ii @teknomunk @CathodeRayGun You know, a few decades back I was getting a little concerned that computing lost its ability to jumpstart itself. Back in the day, it was in relation to porting Linux to SPARC. I noticed that it could not be done other than by cross-compiling. But, once we got it running, a Linux on SPARC would build itself. But as much as I know, this is not true for Android, even now. Literally hundreds of millions of systems in the field, a sophisticated OS with files and processes, and it completely relies on other computers to build it. Overall, we are at a point, where you cannot build a useful computer (and its software) without having another computer first. And, the requirements for that another computer are very high! Given this situation, I wonder if any concern about programmers who only program on top of a stack is a big deal.

@deprecated_ii @pro @teknomunk @CathodeRayGun information on low-level coding is more accessible than it's ever been and the number of people who can do it is much, much larger than in the 1980's.

@Moon @teknomunk @CathodeRayGun @deprecated_ii Yes but D's point was that the _fraction_ of them is getting smaller. I'm exaggerating, but in 1965, humans had 1000 FORTRAN IV programmers and 1000 assembly programmers, that is 50%. In 2015 humans had 5000000 Javascript programmers and 5000 assembly programmers (~1%) and perhaps another 50000 (~10%) of C programmers who can be used as a substitute. The question is if this constitutes a problem for our future or a nothingburger.

@Moon @CathodeRayGun @deprecated_ii @teknomunk wait i clearly fucked up the ratios for percentages

@Moon @deprecated_ii @CathodeRayGun @pro @teknomunk sure how do you define low level because I think of it as ml/assembly for stuff like bus and basic I/O ops

@coldacid @teknomunk @CathodeRayGun @deprecated_ii @Moon One other thing, suppose we have legions of people who know how to hack on Arduio in AVR assembly, but we need 1 guy who knows how nested TLBs work so he can work around a CPU bug that pops in KVM at OVH or Hyper-V at Azure. I used to work on CPUs and the complexity of them was very barely under control.

@pro Self hosting is one of the things I consider pretty important for computing. There's a lot of positive things to say about Rust, but the sheer mass of LLVM and its requirement is the one thing that makes Rust based OSes hard to self-host. CollapseOS is one thing that really focuses on making systems self hosting, but they barely count as "useful computers" by modern standards.