The Tar Pit

For what it's worth -- maybe not that much, but eh -- I'm back on Twitter, or X (an Elon Musk company), as they call it nowadays. Maybe it will turn out to be a waste of time, but then again maybe it won't and in either case there's only one way to find out.

One particularly interesting feature of this X is that you get to hear first-hand stories of decay. Take this for example:

@raysan5: Is there any Computer Science course teaching JS/Python but not C/C++/ASM at some moment? I can hardly believe that...¹

Agree that teaching C + raylib is an amazing alternative, I'm probably biased, but I taught it for +10 years and my students love it!

Some of the replies include:

@GredinTom: Yes, in France there is accelerated graduation in 6 months for ppl who knows nothing and they only learn how to create react apps. It's sad...

@winger_hunter You would be surprised, my school switched to JavaScript and c# a few years back because c/c++ were “too hard for new students” thankfully I started at a community college first that taught me both languages. It’s ridiculous, seniors and half my class can’t work with pointers)

@kybernoita: I don't think during my BSc courses I wrote a single line of C or C++. It's always Python. I hate it here.

... and so on and so forth, I shan't press the point. But (yet again) for what it's worth, this is far from a new trend. To exemplify, I shall add to this my own experience from about a decade ago in Lausanne: while working at a local start-up, my colleagues, most of whom were educated in Eastern Europe, some of them well outside the Bologna Process, were complaining that most students attending the local job fairs only knew Java, no C. Why, do you wonder? well, because that's what they were teaching at the local tech university! And just in case you're wondering, the folks I worked with were for the most part a bunch of hardcore seasoned low-level systems OS/compilers/stack smashing nerds.

So in other olds, the field of education has been getting progressively worse in the last two decades or so, much to no one's surprise. Just so you know, in Romania university financing is allocated per headcount, so the trend has been to raise the number of students eligible for bachelor's studies, and at the same time to keep the graduation rates as high as possible, otherwise the politicians would deallocate money, i.e. the number of available places for study would yet again go down. But wait, there's more! pre-uni studies have consistently degradated, so the quality of the average candidate, for, say, ACS has in fact been going down. Now you do the math regarding grade inflation and the likes. They just had to make it easier for students to graduate, all the while making everyone else's life more complicated. Believe me, I know because I worked there.

So getting back to our Twitter thread, here's an interesting point of view:

@chapmanworld: Please forgive my ignorance, I never completed a computer science course. (self taught career dev)

Surely the point of a computer science course isn't to teach any given language, library or framework, but perhaps only to use them to teach the actual computer science?

He does have a point, doesn't he? Why should it matter whether you study JS, C or whatever the fuck other grotesque language in order to learn programming? Moreso that after enough programming languages, they kinda start repeating.

Anyway, I couldn't help it so I added my reply:

@spykeder: Sure, it's Turing machines all the way down, but contrary to popular opinion, the lowest level² of abstraction are also the simplest.

@spykeder: Yossi Kreinin's "low-level is easy" comes to mind: https://yosefk.com/blog/low-level-is-easy.html³

I really don't think that "low-level is easy", but I do strongly believe that it's simple; and I also think that this confusion between simplicity and ease is why some programmers never seem to get it right. For the sake of example, let's take two opposites in terms of abstraction layering: x86 assembly and JavaScript. No, I'm not choosing JS by mere chance, you'll see in a moment why.

x86 is dead simple, although it isn't simple as far as assembly languages go -- that's why they called it a Complex Instruction Set Computer, didn't they? Yet it's still a whole lot simpler than JS, because it gives the programmer direct access to the CPU registers, while JS hides them beneath layers upon layers of JIT compilation and whatnot. This simplicity is the most important in the most critical of moments, say, when you want to have a fine-grained control over the performance characteristics of your system⁴. But at the same time this simplicity doesn't come with ease, in fact quite the opposite, because if you want to reproduce the behaviour of a JS system, you'll have to rebuild at least some of its abstractions.

Conversely, JS is dead easy: you can write a script and load it in a browser and you're set. But its abstractions are way the hell more complex, just look at the execution model: it's a pain in the ass to get your app to sleep, something which is unheard of in traditional imperative programming.

I'm not going to go deeper into examples, I think I've stated my point pretty well. But in any case, simplicity is the opposite of complexity, measured as, say, the number of variables in a system. Ease on the other hand is sheer power or readiness-to-hand -- when I press the "publish" button, I don't need to be conscious of the complexities of HTTP POST calls, PHP interpretation, SQL table insertions and so on and so forth, but regardless, the complexity is wholly there, intricately weaved into the implementation of my blog.

That's about it, really.

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