On Tue, Jul 25, 2017 at 12:49:17PM +0200, Dr. Nikolaus Klepp wrote:
>Am Dienstag, 25. Juli 2017 schrieb Didier Kryn:
>> > https://around.com/ariane.html
>>

>>      Even with a high level language carefully designed to discourage
>> loose programming and dirty low-level tricks, it is still possible,
>> although with strong efforts, to fuck the compiler and keep programming
>> at a very low level. And, unfortunately, there are programmers who like
>> doing such things.

>
>And there is a whole generation of programmers comming fresh from university that do not know the difference between bits and bytes. For me that's even scarier.

In 2014, I was still in high school.

My high-school programming class was advertised as teaching people how to
program in C and do all sorts of low-level stuff. I signed up thinking
I might finally meet a "computer expert" that actually knew what they
were talking about...

The teacher began by forcing us all to make "hello world" applications
IN JAVA!

When the assignments got more complex (still in Java), I decided to run
vim off a flash drive to edit the sources because I was self-taught and
doing something (somewhat) low-level. The teacher threatened to have me
expelled for "hacking" because he didn't like the white text on a black
background; we were only allowed to use the Eclipse IDE.

The whole experience would be laughable if it weren't affecting my GPA.
Once I set the vim colorscheme to "black on white" and set :syn off, I
recieved the "most improved" award at the end of the year. (I _was_ a
self-taught C programmer since I was 12, after all...)

If it weren't for prior experience, the internet, and people like you guys
(and girls, etc.), I would have ended up as some idiot who does all their
important work in Java and thinks that writing an OS in Visual Basic is
a good idea. (That was actually an extra credit assignment... the "OS"
was actually just a script that ran under Windows.)

At 16, I found myself mentioning to a classmate "Back in MY day, we
could process comma-seperated-values without loading up a graphics API!"

Please, KEEP DOING WHAT YOU'RE DOING!
I have seen our "successors", and they are all brain-dead MCSEs!
As members of the steadily-declining demographic of "old-fashioned"
hackers, it falls to us to keep things in somewhat-usable states!

(I am ~19 years old now, and I am considered to be a "Linux-loving old
fart". Go figure...)

I think that everyone should have to learn how to write a simple shell
for an 8-bit architecture before they can be considered a real programmer. ;P

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