The first PC my family had, and thus first computer I had extensive experience with, was a Dell Pentium 4 running XP. Yeah, obviously I used a file system implicitly, but I remember thinking later when I entered college and the workforce that I was deprived of learning how to use a “real” computer because I didn’t get to experience the consumer PCs of the 80s. I didn’t have experience with a C64, I didn’t need to learn BASIC or a command line just to use the computer. As a user, understanding how reads and writes to disk happened, and how to make the best use of my working memory wasn’t necessary, the OS handled it all. I just needed to know to click “eject” first. And yet I’m doing fine (I think :D).
My point is, every generation will be able to say “I grew up with a dumbed down computing experience”. But I’m more optimistic about this I think. I welcome a generation of computer scientists who think completely differently about how files should be organized. It’s not important that I know BASIC, and maybe it’s not important that today’s students think in terms of file systems. They’re still smart people, they’ll still need to learn trees and graphs to solve problems. They just won’t be pre-programmed with assumptions and requirements that may not exist anymore or in future hardware.
2023 python programmers not understanding why you need to use the context manager when you open files (or not learning c++ first) “whats a file socket?” “why do exceptions mess everything up” “__exit__ worse than c++ destructors” (if they even know dunder methods and didn’t have python as a first language) “whats the big deal if you don’t close a file”
I don’t disagree that things like Windows 95 were “dumbed down” from the things that came before it, but a lot more is hidden and obfuscated in mobile operating systems than even on the latest Windows and Mac.
Probably my biggest concern is that you cannot develop software for an Android or iOS device from itself. Every computer from the Apple II and Commodore 64 up to the latest Windows and Mac desktops and laptops have the ability to develop software for themselves, even going as far as the entire stack from the bootloader to the application layer. The computer is self-sufficient in that regard.
Mobile computing breaks this model. Mobile OSes generally can not run their own development environments, especially not full stack (for kernel, driver, etc.) development. Few mobile OSes even allow root/admin permission to even see how the underlying code works.
The abstraction is on an entirely new level and that’s concerning to me.
The first PC my family had, and thus first computer I had extensive experience with, was a Dell Pentium 4 running XP. Yeah, obviously I used a file system implicitly, but I remember thinking later when I entered college and the workforce that I was deprived of learning how to use a “real” computer because I didn’t get to experience the consumer PCs of the 80s. I didn’t have experience with a C64, I didn’t need to learn BASIC or a command line just to use the computer. As a user, understanding how reads and writes to disk happened, and how to make the best use of my working memory wasn’t necessary, the OS handled it all. I just needed to know to click “eject” first. And yet I’m doing fine (I think :D).
My point is, every generation will be able to say “I grew up with a dumbed down computing experience”. But I’m more optimistic about this I think. I welcome a generation of computer scientists who think completely differently about how files should be organized. It’s not important that I know BASIC, and maybe it’s not important that today’s students think in terms of file systems. They’re still smart people, they’ll still need to learn trees and graphs to solve problems. They just won’t be pre-programmed with assumptions and requirements that may not exist anymore or in future hardware.
2023 python programmers not understanding why you need to use the context manager when you open files (or not learning c++ first) “whats a file socket?” “why do exceptions mess everything up” “__exit__ worse than c++ destructors” (if they even know dunder methods and didn’t have python as a first language) “whats the big deal if you don’t close a file”
I don’t disagree that things like Windows 95 were “dumbed down” from the things that came before it, but a lot more is hidden and obfuscated in mobile operating systems than even on the latest Windows and Mac.
Probably my biggest concern is that you cannot develop software for an Android or iOS device from itself. Every computer from the Apple II and Commodore 64 up to the latest Windows and Mac desktops and laptops have the ability to develop software for themselves, even going as far as the entire stack from the bootloader to the application layer. The computer is self-sufficient in that regard.
Mobile computing breaks this model. Mobile OSes generally can not run their own development environments, especially not full stack (for kernel, driver, etc.) development. Few mobile OSes even allow root/admin permission to even see how the underlying code works.
The abstraction is on an entirely new level and that’s concerning to me.