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Comment by angott | Hacker News Reader

I have an interesting story to tell closely related to this. I used to work as a teaching assistant for an undergraduate computer networking course at UBC. As part of the course, we would usually ask the students to write a simple POP email server, in order to practice their socket programming skills. This was an assignment designed by a professor in the early 2000s, when being able to set up an email client was considered a basic computer skill.

Fast forward to 2019, and I can say that roughly 80% of students in the class didn't know what POP, IMAP or SMTP were. Before being able to get started on the assignment, we would have to provide them with additional material explaining how emails are delivered and what an email client does to retrieve them. The majority of students just grew up using the Gmail app or whatever self-configuring email clients they had on their phone/laptop, so they had no idea of what we were asking them to build.

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I think this is now related to the democratization of programming than it is to Gmail in particular. CS as a major used to be limited to people who were already self taught and had a solid understanding of how computers and networks worked. It has become not just acceptable, but common, for CS majors not to have grown up programming. I think that's overall a good thing.

Oh yes, it surely is, and I didn’t mean to hit at Gmail or any particular player. Additionally, I think it also speaks a lot about how industry did a very good job in constructing easy-to-use abstractions on top of tech that used to be hard to configure for a first-time user back in the days.

I used to work as a teaching assistant for an undergraduate computer networking course at UBC. As part of the course, we would usually ask the students to write a simple line editor, in order to practice their IO programming skills. This was an assignment designed by a professor in the early 1980s, when being able to work ed was considered a basic computer skill.

Fast forward to 1999, and I can say that roughly 80% of students in the class didn't know what ed was. Before being able to get started on the assignment, we would have to provide them with additional material explaining how to use a line editor and why you need one. The majority of students just grew up using Emacs, VI, Notepad or whatever visual editor they had on their computer, so they had no idea of what we were asking them to build.

Email is still widely used by billions of people whereas line editors never were.

Email is still widely used, but POP is not. Text editors are still widely used but ed is not.

Maybe, but SMTP and IMAP are still widely used. It seems reasonable for a computer science student to implement these protocols.

You'd expect a CS student to at least know what SMTP and IMAP are, even if they don't know how they work.

Just as you'd expect a CS student to know what Emacs is, even if they've never used it.

Relying on gmail horrifies me, because it's a classic political enclosure pattern.

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