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Comment by hutzlibu | Hacker News Reader

There is a scene in Orwells Homage to Catalonia that reminds me about this:

A young italian peasant militia man, stands with open mouth, astonished off his genious officers, who were reading a simple map. So, this is an old trope.

Education is important it seems and while I don't think that everyone needs to get along with a terminal, everyone should at least understand what it is. For most people computers are essentially dark magic. And I think this us not doing good to society that has become so dependant on Computers.

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Nah, let them keep thinking typing ‘ls’ is black magic. Keeps our salaries high :P

jokes on you, a new generation of people are coming up having known nothing but smartphones. I work with one as a developer. She only uses her macbook because she has to. Very little insight of how the underlying OS and fundamental computing stacks works and yet she writes good fast code.

The companies are all colluding to lock down computing more and more and who do you think will push back against this? Not them thats for sure. If you never let the greater population understand the freedom they have now, they wont fight back when it comes time to try and take it away. Its probably too late anyway.

Pretty soon you'll be writing code in a locked down appliance with no freedom (or AI takes your job).

I work with developers like that too. When they see me doing rudimentary things in Linux, they view me as a wizard. My job is safe and my skills are rare and valued.

Bet when you started the greybeards of the time were miffed you couldn't just do assembly or read a hex dump like it was a newspaper, and you turned out alright (maybe).

> Very little insight of how the underlying OS and fundamental computing stacks works and yet [...] good fast code.

What domain is this? That's near impossible in most!

Frontend web mostly doesn't care about OS performance. Should care, but nearly anything works nowadays :V

If you have enough abstraction (like with the web) and understand basic performance principles, like instructing the computer to only do, what is neccessary, then one doesn't need to understand the system beneath, to get performant code.

It is mostly enough to know that method A is expensive (e.g. drawing a big image) so if you avoid it, than this what brings you good enough performance.

So sure, no one is talking about high performance low level graphic engine code. For this you clearly need to understand the bare bone metal interface. And of course the baseline is pretty low these days. The ordinary web is full of horrible inefficient ways of doing things, so you are probably already above standard, if you avoid the worst habits..

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