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139 points obscurette | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.57s | source
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floppyd ◴[] No.44465285[source]
"Old man yells at cloud", but in so-so-so many words
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torlok ◴[] No.44465450[source]
It's always old people complaining that 20-year-olds didn't learn programming 40 years ago like they did when computers had 5 assembly instructions, and a beeper for peripherals.
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palata ◴[] No.44465549[source]
I understand how it may sound like this, given that older people will talk about assembly and electronics which most young developers have absolutely no clue about today and are still considered "software developers".

But it's not specifically about assembly, it's about software design. You can take a modern programming language (say Swift or Rust) and look at how software written with those languages is architected, and the points still stand: abstractions above abstractions above abstractions because people don't understand the lower levels.

People routinely write completely wrong CMakeLists and then complain about CMake being "sooo bad". But give them Meson and they will make a mess as well. People have no clue about packaging and distribution, so they will say "it sucks sooo badly" and will distribute their code as a docker container, embedded in a 6GB Ubuntu image. Most emails you receive just contain a couple lines of useful information, yet they are generated by higher-level systems, full of HTML and bullshit and it's impossible to read in a simple client. Etc.

Software quality is going down year after year, it is a fact. Probably because it is becoming more and more accessible, but the fact remains.

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1. scott_w ◴[] No.44465636[source]
> I understand how it may sound like this, given that older people will talk about assembly and electronics which most young developers have absolutely no clue about today and are still considered "software developers".

As a software engineer in his mid-30s now, I can assure you many "older people" will have little-to-no memory of messing around with assembly and electronics. When I was getting started, my boss told me about an engineer who had a deep knowledge of how to lay out data to efficiently read and process it. My response? "I just stick it in Postgres and it does it all for me!" No shade to that engineer but I do believe he was in his 50s/60s at the time, so it's quite likely he's retired on a decent pension by now!

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2. palata ◴[] No.44468589[source]
I am not sure exactly where you are going with that. But yeah, sure, not everybody needs assembly.

My point is that because the author uses assembly as an example does not mean that their points are not valid.