My first actual programming class was on an Intel 8085 kit, and I have to say that hand-assembling on pre-printed carbon sheets was pretty cool. It has served me well in my career to have started at that level.
Unfortunately we now have a culture that views this type of knowledge acquisition as "gatekeeping"
I still can't figure out how programming computers (the most complex task a human can undertake) managed to become singled out as the only profession in the history of humanity that is simultaneously assumed by so many to be something you need only a cursory understanding of to be proficient at.
Now this is not to say on the frontiers of it its not very complicated. But so is every other field. Ever thought about plumbing a space station? Or designing a rapid deploy bridge? You can't compare frontiers of one field with the middle of the other.
both fields that have strict educational and credential requirements to practice professionally. Both strictly - dare I say it - gate-kept.
While the exam can be avoided if one isn't into signing contracts and taking legal responsibility in project execution, the order still has a last word to say regarding which universities are allowed to actually claim that they give engineering titles in Informatics.
This can be traced to the 1970s.
Computer Science is only half of a field. Semi-arbitrarily splitting it off from EE harmed both fields. Instead of one complex field, there are two very shallow fields.
I still can't figure out how programming computers (the most complex task a human can undertake)
Neuroscience, making pizza (or most cooking, really), marketing, high-speed motorsport, psychology, most weapons development (outside of guns, which are fundamentally simple), writing mass-market books and drug development all seem to have programming beat in terms of complexity for what ninety-nine percent of professional programmers do.
Jobs worded it well in an interview at one point. Something along the lines of, "I knew there was a market for people who would never be able to design hardware or put a kit together but who still would love to write their own software," in the context of why the Apple II was successful. It works just as well to show why the field is the way it is.
Most computer programmers don't have a clue how the hardware works. That used to be an essential part of it. It's not any longer. The bar has gotten lower and lower, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Python can be learned in an hour, so why not? They can still make useful things, so there's no problem with it.
Just like in any other field, the bar for "proficient" is low compared to average, but the bar for "exceptional" is high.
The bar has multiplied into multiple bars all at the their own levels but in different dimensions.
You can have an innate understanding from a single transistor to how individual frames are handled by an ethernet PHY to how the packet scheduler will interact with your userspace app and be an "exceptional" developer.
But the moment someone asks you to write an Android app that hits and endpoint and displays the data with some formatting none of that matters if you've never written an Android app.
Nothing is exceptional in a vacuum, and "programming" is so vast with so much space between disciplines it might as well be a vacuum.
Writing an Android application is not something that requires anyone to learn an entirely new skillset. At most, it's a programming language and a toolkit of difference for any experienced programmer.
How is learning a new programming language and new toolkit not learning a new skillset???
Even in a literal sense of the two words:
Skill: "a particular ability."
Tool: "a piece of software that carries out a particular function, typically creating or modifying another program."
How is learning "a piece of software that carries out a particular function" not "a particular ability."
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In a non-literal sense, learning to write an Android App is a new skill if you didn't know how to do it before. Like you could happen to have Java experience so it's less new to you, but either you knew how to do it before, or you didn't and now you do... so you learned how to do it.
Are we literally at the point of gatekeeping what it means to learn how to do something??
Riding a Mongoose bike is not substantially different from riding a Schwinn bike. Riding a pink bike is not substantially different from riding a green bike. Writing Java is not substantially different from writing any ALGOL-derivative.
It's like saying writing a program for FreeBSD requires a different skillset than doing so for NetBSD. It doesn't.
Not everything is gatekeeping, and it's disingenuous to claim so.
You literally reduced language design to changing colors on a bicycle.
Are you joking?
You have no idea what Android is if you think it’s development process vs Java (which Java? Embedded Java, desktop with JavaFX? Server side?) is like FreeBSD vs NetBSD.
Maybe more like FreeBSD vs Windows and you’re trying to write a UI application, but technically you can use C on both platforms so it’s the same right?
Thanks for the chuckle in these dreary times...
By the way do you actually think syntactic differences are all that separate languages so once you know the general syntax you pretty much know the language, or are you pretending to not know how programming in multiple languages actually works to prove a point?
A: I've written a couple.
B: Anyone who knows any ALGOL (exception: 68), Pascal, Oberon, so forth, will get Java in minutes.
You have no idea what Android is if you think it’s development process vs Java (which Java? Embedded Java, desktop with JavaFX? Server side?) is like FreeBSD vs NetBSD.
Maybe more like FreeBSD vs Windows and you’re trying to write a UI application, but technically you can use C on both platforms so it’s the same right?
You're demonstrating reasoning flaws, alongside misinterpreting my words. Writing an application for, say, NeXT, back in the day, isn't different at all from writing a modern Mac application. What you do carries over. It's the same basic steps every time. Write a desktop Linux application, write a desktop Windows application, write a Mac application, write an iOS application, write an Android application. You'll have to use a few different wrappers or libraries, but it's not a new skillset.
You claimed that learning a new language is giving yourself a new skillset. It's not with the majority of languages, especially languages like Java, which introduce little compared to their immediate predecessors outside of syntax changes.
By the way do you actually think syntactic differences are all that separate languages so once you know the general syntax you pretty much know the language, or are you pretending to not know how programming in multiple languages actually works to prove a point?
This is a frankly ridiculous comment. ALGOL-derivatives grab more from ALGOL than syntax, and some don't borrow syntax at all. Any Pascal programmer can go from writing Pascal to Oberon to Java to ALGOL to Go with ten minutes per language, in any order, despite the differences in syntax. The languages are not differentiated strongly enough to matter; that C programmers could go to writing Java in the span of a day was a major selling point that Sun used, and C and Java are more different (though again, not that different) than any of the previously-listed languages.
Any J programmer can go from J to APL to K to Nial trivially as well, despite vast differences in syntax. Knowing one or the other doesn't mean you have a differing skillset.
The same is true for most Lisps (Connection Machine Lisp being an exception, as a counter-example; despite that, knowing any of these isn't a new skillset).
Just because something requires you doing something slightly and superficially different than what you were already doing doesn't mean it's magically a new skillset. Defining finding new libraries as "new skillsets" is just silly, and erodes the meaning of the term.
I don’t know if you actually believe this, or you’re defining write as in literally type letters that compile instead of being able to write useful productive code in each.
The rest of your comment is more wtfs kind of like that one.
This is not a productive use of my time because either you have no idea what you’re talking about, or you do but you’re intentionally throwing basic reasoning skills straight out the window and leaning heavily into playing games with semantics to support your point at all costs.
Now I’ll be charitable and assume the latter, but if that’s your goal, then what more is there to say?
Yes, Android vs Java is a pink bicycle vs a green one. Pat yourself on the back for that revelation.
But riding a unicycle is somewhat different than riding a bicycle, even though they look a bit similar and even have some of the same features. You’re drastically underestimating the amount of time it takes to write a new language proficiently: perhaps you’re confusing the ability to read a language from writing it?
You do need a fair amount of education, though - for every meaningful profession _except_ programming.
I'm in the opposite boat. I've learned so much about the theory of computing that I almost can't program anymore because most of what we do today feels like a waste of time to me. It's all convention and application now, with so many barriers to entry that I feel like 95% of what I do on any given day is setup. The dreams I had for how computing might evolve and lead us to the endgame of AGI feel more distant to me now than ever before. It will likely happen through the biggest players, using whatever proprietary tech they come up with, and leave garage hackers in the dust. I don't have a good feeling about whatever artificial agents arise from that.
So there is a lot of survivor bias in programming today. I feel like Obi-Wan Kenobi, beat down by the industry, marooned on some distant planet. Meanwhile the youth subscribe to empire quickly, because all they see is glorious rewards. Seeing haggard old graybeards like me fall from such early potential makes them rightfully skeptical of the gatekeeping you describe, the adherence to the old religion of computer science.
Or I'm just full of it. I don't even know anymore. I wish I was part of something bigger again.
I keep getting back in my thoughts to an old carpenter who was making a truly wonderful kitchen in a strange corner of an old building. Non of the walls, ceiling or floor around it were straight and it had tons of weird niches. I ask him how he could attack such a problem with such confidence. I would have to spend days pulling my hairs just making a drawing. He said, carpentry is roughly 300 methods of which you only need 120 to 140 to do any job. The rest is just tricks that you don't really need but they are impressive to those who know the problem.
I keep thinking of that in programing context for some reason. Nowadays you just order a plug and play kitchen that fits exactly, a novice can ikea it into place, everything works and it looks fantastic. Programming will get there one day. Until it does it will just look really weird to the old carpenter. So you grind the wood down to Particle board, you glue plastic on it that looks like wood then it gets moist and you replace the entire kitchen? .....!
A few years into my dev career, I adapted to make maintainable stuff. Because I learned that in 6 months I'd have to fix my own bugs.
Now it seems most code is throwaway, one-off, write only.
I haven't been able to "let it go". I still obsess over making my code correct. No one else seems to care. They get rewarded for fixing their own bugs ("velocity!") which I mostly avoid. So my KPIs look terrible by comparison.
Bootcamps demonstrate that not knowing assembly is not a barrier to earning a decent software engineer salary.