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urthorHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I truly, truly, cannot see myself writing software in a systems programming language, ever, for the …

… I truly, truly, cannot see myself writing software in a systems programming language, ever, for the rest of my career. I'll only work in GC languages. I love reasoning about code, logically. I'm studying compilers/mathematics in night school, that's how much I love it. But... I learnt Rust, learnt assembly. I set up a Raspberry Pi Pico as a hardware debugger as a fun project. That knowledge's usefulness is... tenuous. I appreciate the assembly mental model, but it's only a rough mental model. I truly, truly, cannot see myself using non-garbage compiled programming languages for any of my future project ideas. Knowledge of the underlying machine is irrelevant. Same as knowledge of the electrical resistance threshold of your transistors before a bit flip. Computing is changing, fast, as we ascend layers of abstraction at an extraordinary pace. Most knowledge is highly specialized to your level of abstraction. SICP/functional programming HAS to justify itself as relevant to each level of abstraction.

Original discussionSussman Explains the End of SICP389 source comments · at import
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veltasHN

This change is necessary because young people aren't interested in the fundamental abilities of computers, instead they're only interested in the applications. If you grow up playing video games and using social media then you won't appreciate programming if you're made to start from the bare metal. There is a certain kind of person who's interested in this, but most people instead are better motivated by demonstrations that relate to them. Robotics is cool regardless and allows the kids to "smell blood" early on, it lets them be dangerous, and then maybe one day some of them will be motivated enough to slow down and understand the old principles that underlie all of this.

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mixmastamykHN

I had a similar trajectory, but would not describe that learning as useless or irrelevant. That knowledge informs my every decision, and understanding hardware or algorithms is why I'm sometimes able to find a better technique or abstraction for a project than other folks. Plus it's just more satisfying.

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iniminoHN

This is the right perspective, and you should continue to pursue your own projects using the languages that make you most productive. Don't study what does not interest you. The problem is if you change majors to engineering, the first courses are not going to teaching you what is exciting and flashy, they are going to teach you the very boring, mostly unmotivated maths that you need later to build bridges that won't collapse. SICP represented the engineering approach, by starting from first principles (more logical than mathematical, but appealing for similar reasons) and then proceeded to an understanding of interpreters, compilers, register machines, and so on. Giving up on SICP meant giving up on the engineering approach which produces programmers, to the software engineering approach, which leaves out the hard parts of engineering and produces software users, who plug together libra…

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hgsgmHN

> I truly, truly, cannot see myself using non-garbage compiled programming languages Unfortunate typo.

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beej71HN

For me, an older dev, I felt that knowing assembly and other "not useful" techs had a general positive effect on my skill as a dev. Does that still resonate at all?

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veltasHN

Yes, this fits my understanding and know I'm not judging you or people like you. I understand this because I'm the same way, but from my own era.

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hnfongHN

I don't like "shaming" people for not learning "fundamentals", and I believe people should learn whatever they want to at their own pace, but since you asked -- Sometimes you run into bugs (or leaky abstractions) that force you to go down a couple layers. Perhaps you run into a bug in the C/C++ code of your language's compiler. Sometimes a dependency (written in C of course) of your stack gets a nasty CVE and you need to figure out the implications (often being able to read the patch will help). Ever heard of "Meltdown" and "Spectre"? Those were bugs in CPU design which require understanding of how low level operations work. In junior roles nobody will bother you with these questions, but senior devs are expected to know how to understand and deal with these issues if relevant, even if they're normally using a super high level language, because they don't exist in a vacuum, they depend o…

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