Is software abstraction killing civilization? (2021)

The concept of files and file systems is useful to regular computer users, even when they have no interest in knowing how things work under the hood. The issue is with mobile OSs, and that software companies like their apps to be a walled garden for your data as much as possible, and therefore resist exposing your data as files living in a normal shared file system. Even if you already work with files, they have you “import” your existing data into their storage system, and you have to manually “export” (or “share”) any modifications as a new, separate copy.

> I teach the systems class at Montana State, where we go from transistors up to a real computing system, and I have students that don't understand what a file system really is when they start my class

Admittedly I am old grouch, but I stopped having any expectations of the current generation of "college kids".

Incidentally, I'm at Montana State getting a master's in IE, and I deal daily with this one PhD student who has demonstrated an inability to perform a simple partial derivative, which you'd think is a pretty useful skill given the subject matter. Hell, last semester in a 400-level math course, one of the students didn't understand how to add two matrices, I kid you not. It is odd that a senior in CS wouldn't know what a file system is, but that seems rather quaint compared to some of the wild bullshit I've encountered here.

My first stint in university in the 2000s felt a lot different than this, and it's a bit depressing. But man, I feel just great about my prospects in the job market next spring.

This depends on the specialization. Computer science vs. computer or electronics engineering, for example.

Computer science, despite the misnomer, is not about computers, even if computers are an indispensable tool in the field. Computer science is all about abstraction and language modeling of a domain and their application; the computing technology of the tool, however important practically, is an implementation detail. Just as it pays for the astronomer to understand how to operate his telescope in due proportion to his needs as an astronomer, it pays for the computer science person to understand how to operate his computer to the degree that he needs to. But it is a total mistake to place the computer at the center of the universe and treat it as the point of departure for what computer science is really about. This muddles things and is a source of much historical confusion in the field, and in fact, this discussion.

In fact, even the language of "low-level" programming or whatever is abstraction and language. It is simply the language of the computing device that must be used to simulate the abstractions of the domain of discourse.

I learned computer architecture using MIPS when MIPS were actually used in things. It was nice then, and is nice now.

I spend a lot of my free time decompiling MIPS assembly and small functions can be decompiled to matching C by “hand” without need other tools.

"I teach the systems class at Montana State,"

You teach and hence deal with this: "Information passed on between generations is diluted"

Is it diluted? No it isn't. Your job is teaching and books and computers help us avoid calling you a bard 8) Mind you, being called a bard is not a bad thing!

In the end this is a blog post response to another blog post. I have no idea about how "important" those bloggers are but I smell ... randomly deployed blogging for the sake of it. That's the whole point of a blog anyway. I'm being polite here ...

> When I look at modern 64 bit architecture books that get suggested for me to teach with I just laugh

Why I recommend Bryant/O'Hallaron's Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective (for comparch) to newbies, as coding is what most folks are likely to be doing early on.

https://books.google.com/books/about/Computer_Systems.html?i...

Actual old fashioned file systems aren’t really in use anymore, and the computerized versions hide the details, you don’t even get a command prompt on an iPad. I’m pretty sure my 8 year old has no clue what a file system is yet (I learned at about 7 when my dad brought home an Osborne with pre-DOS CPM to play around with). Computers don’t require you to know that stuff anymore just to use apps and save/get files.

God, you're right, this is almost as bad as those "well chemistry is just applied physics and physics is just applied mathematics so math is the best" nonsense that shows up every so often.

Blow's talk made me realize I'm not crazy when I get frustrated about basic things being incredibly difficult. Drawing a button to the screen when you want to build a software application has become so difficult that most people just use a progressive web app which is 100x slower than is possible. Are the best options for GUI applications in 2025 really Java Swing and Qt?

I agree with your point, but DX12 went in the opposite direction of abstraction: it's a much lower level API than the highly abstracted OpenGL.

> Unless something changes, the hiring pool is going to continue to decrease in size.

Or, we'll see the return of "trainees"?

I guess what needs to improve more than anything, is the teaching and documentation of these new APIs. There are over-arching ideas that pull things together, but they aren't alluded to in the documentation, you need to attend a training session, or speak to someone who has.

What an odd claim to make, but he did.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42824720

I have been around for long enough to remember the vanilla js, jQuery, Knockout, and Angular 1 days and it always came with a baseline mess.

React (sometimes just JSX) can be used sensibly.

Instead, I blame VC-backed tooling like Vercel, Next, Apollo, Prisma, and all the other rubbish Webdevfluencers are paid to fill the web with.

Come to think of it, every part of building software is bloated. From Notion boards to questionable DB choices.

I agree with you that it's awful that a lot of young developers wouldn't be able to program without React.

I would like to add as someone would has no problems working without any library that the DOM is one of worst APIs ever invented by humankind and that "reactive programming" is a superior model to what we used to do before.

That being said: - NextJS rolled back years of tooling improvements, it's much slower than Vite - I just statically built a NextJS and a page that has no interactivity downloads 100KB of JS to do nothing with it - Facebook decided to make a "compiler" for React instead of just not pointlessly re-rednering components by default - Compared to Preact which is almost a drop in replacement, React is huge! This shows how little Facebook cares.

> a bunch of kids now do not even know that HTML is what gets rendered in the browser. They think that React is itself what browsers render.

Ironically, they are right and you are wrong.

HTML is a serialization format, which browsers use to construct a DOM in memory.

React renders directly to the DOM without ever serializing anything to HTML.

The fact that you got this wrong and are so highly upvoted really drives home the “old man shakes fist at clouds” nature of this thread.

What do you mean by "HTML is what gets rendered by the browser"? In the context of using Javascript to modify the DOM.

My understanding is that HTML is an input to the browser, which is translated to the DOM. (Which is then translated to painting the screen, handling inputs etc.) This is an important distinction in context of your point. React (Or any VDOM or similar JS lib) isn't creating HTML; it's creating a set of DOM manipulation instructions in JS.

That was the whole point of react, right? To create something that wouldn't work at all without JavaScript enabled and would be enough of a mess that Facebook could effectively hide their malware in it.

I think many of Blow's points are good, but that he overlooks that much of the degradation isn't a facet of some kind of generational drift or information entropy but is straight up malevolence on the part of people making the decisions.

> They think that React is itself what browsers render

My kingdom for native JSX in the browser. That would be awesome.

Something similar to how we have WebGL and Canvas, but for pure JavaScript UI without the extra step of DOM reconciliation.

There’s a small (and growing) cohort of people working on rendering React Native directly on canvas or webgl (I think). Supposedly gives you super smooth UX, but I haven’t knowingly tried it yet.

Agreed.

Blow's taken the better part of a decade to make a game where he didn't even need to invent the mechanics and Muratori never finished a game he started a decade ago.

Meanwhile if you use modern game engines (including stuff like Raylib) you can have a pretty decent result in a weekend game jam session, and you could probably make Blow's Sobokan game in ~6 months or so (especially with a team of ~10).

What do you disagree with Casey Muratori on specifically? I have seen some of his content and he seems pretty humble but opinionated on things he knows about. I also think he did a great job with handmade hero.

Muratori's main talking point seems to be that modern software is slow. I think he is 100% correct on this. It's absolutely insane how long it takes jira to show me a ticket or slack to switch chat rooms and that vscode can't keep with up with normal typing speed.

Does he though?

It seems like he just makes these broad critical statements then pisses off to continue to do nothing.

I wouldn’t even say he’s accomplished great things. He’s accomplished some decent things.

He’s released two games which barely qualify as games. They’re more like puzzles. You don’t need to play them ever again after you finish the first time. Braid is ok. And the Witness is just Flow. And then after that he’s been working on a programming language for the past decade which he hasn’t released to the public because “it’s not finished”.

He got lucky and made his nut and ever since then has thought of himself as way more talented than he is.

So your rebuttal is that they’re wrong because they’re young and inexperienced? OK, maybe, but what exactly are they wrong about? You haven’t actually added anything to the conversation with this ad hominem attack.

Could you expand on how Figma is destroying the design world?

Which points do you think the author has missed?

"It appears that author is from that newer generation"

No it doesn't. Nothing else you wrote here is true either.

He demolished Blows argument so I don't think it's important to bring up age but it does seem like he is likely at least in his mid forties. The Amiga was popular in the late 80s

> "The argument that software is advancing is obviously false" I still regularly use my beloved Amiga computers. A couple of weeks ago, I was copying a file to an Amiga's hard drive when the computer suddenly decided to crash on me. Not because I did something wrong, but because old home computer OS:es weren't very stable. This resulted in a corrupted hard drive partition and the OS failed to re-validate the file system. My only option was, in the end, to re-format the partition.

I don't even know much about design but I can tell your claims about Figma are totally wrong, in a similar fashion to blows claims. It's the nostalgia talking. You're forgetting the fact that user interface has always had a lot of crap, just like software just like everything. The positives of the old cream of the crop is remembered while all the crap and even all the failings of the well designed things are forgotten

> I don't disagree that software engineering is not as rigorous as it was.

Such an utter BS. Modern run-of-the-mill software would run stadiums around the software of 80-s or 90-s.

Version tracking, continuous integration, and even _bug_ tracking was not at all common in 90-s.

Testing? That's so far ahead of the state-of-the-art of even 2000-s that it's not even funny. Even the basic unit testing was a huge step ahead in 2000-s. And fuzz testing, ubiquitous sanitizers, time-travel debugging are all novel to the mainstream development.

And that's not all. We're now not just talking about formal methods, but applying them in practice (see: WUFFS). And we now have safety-oriented low-level languages like Rust (that's just basically 10 years old).