Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

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I believe the current trend of high level languages will continue. Your average coder already is working at a high abstraction level, with many not even having to deal with direct file access or memory management. Even the ones who do work at lower levels frequently do not get down to assembly.

When I started this career a couple decades ago, this was not the case. Most people worked in C, with the majority at least having had exposure to, if not direct professional experience at the assembly level. The abstractions we work at today existed, but were were just written off as toys and script, not "real programming".

I think this will continue - most software developers will be re-using components, piecing them together like legos. Actually writing code to make those components happen will be less common.

There will always be people who can work at all levels of the systems... but the crowd of coders just making a living will move higher and higher in terms of abstraction.

Well, I'm gonna be one of the "all levels of the systems" guys. Honestly, if suddenly my job was nothing more than piecing components together, only writing stuff in super high level languages, I'd quit. I love my job, because I actually have to use my brain to do it right.

And then I'd work as a garbage man or something, and write good old code at home. ;-)

Or you can start your own company and write good old code at work for profit.

Your average coder already is working at a high abstraction level

Scripting is not more abstract than C. You can perfectly-well script in C too. Add a garbage collector. You no longer need to call the free() function. Add a few dynamically-growing structures such as a hashtable ("map") and an arraylist ("vector"). You no longer define struct data types and instead, store everything in (JSON-style) hashtables and arraylists. Define a union of all primitive types and call that "var". Now you only use the "var" type. That's it. Except for the obvious lack of syntactic sugar, that should hide the ugly details, you are now scripting in C.

And who is it to blame ? It's extremely hard to get to that level of expertize when it comes to low level and C/ASM. And another thing is to transmute this knowledge to $$$. Yes your 1%center that gets paid 500$k in Oracle is probably considered rich and successful.

But how can you start working on low level and get at least the same amount of money than in other fields / areas in IT ?

And do not forget that it is extremely tied to either big corporations, asian HW manufacturers or other big companies (like car makers) that simply requires this type of knowledge.

There was probably a zero chance for me to dive deeper into this in my country. Yes at uni they teach you some C and algorithms but it is the top of the iceberg.

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