Post #115906

2026-01-06 21:49 UTC

@jackwilliambell@rustedneuron.com @cstross@wandering.shop let's be honest: the absolute majority of 'developers' these days can't read K&R and would burst into flames upon being presented with Perl. Brooks, Wirth, it doesn't matter, they'll refuse, fail to comprehend, and insist that it's too old and only they have the brilliance for modern programming.

Replies (5)

@blackcoat@kind.social 2026-01-06 22:03

@rootwyrm@weird.autos @jackwilliambell@rustedneuron.com @cstross@wandering.shop which is funny, because at least half of modern programming has been working to abstract away these complications in order to "deliver faster".

Open ##3518281
@landley@mstdn.jp 2026-01-06 22:43

@rootwyrm@weird.autos @jackwilliambell@rustedneuron.com @cstross@wandering.shop I'm reluctant to "kids these days" when survivorship bias is right there. I remember the Minesweeper Certified Solitaire Experts and how my college went from refusing to teach C because Pascal to refusing to teach C because Java. (Let alone all the "C++ contains the whole of C and is thus just as good a language the way this mud pie contains an entire glass of water and is thus just as good a beverage"...) Sturgeon's Law is ubiquitous.

Open ##3518282
@seachaint@masto.hackers.town 2026-01-07 02:03

@rootwyrm@weird.autos @jackwilliambell@rustedneuron.com @cstross@wandering.shop Are we pretending now that Perl wasn't always a write-only language? :blobcatsipsweats:

Open ##3518283
@WigglyWigtails@theblower.au 2026-01-07 03:22

@rootwyrm@weird.autos This sounds like a "young people nowadays... Back in my day... ". There are added layers of abstraction and it's trivial for robust connections and data exchange to occur. Developers these days are doing same same but different things. I think their, I'm hesitant to say "lack of knowledge", frees them up to make the same, but also new mistakes. And in doing so, reinvent old patterns themselves. Doing it for yourself vs learning from past masters... Is one arguably better than the other? @jackwilliambell@rustedneuron.com @cstross@wandering.shop

Open ##3518297
@thorne@rants.au 2026-01-07 10:47

@rootwyrm@weird.autos @jackwilliambell@rustedneuron.com @cstross@wandering.shop Among the myriad wildly implausible dystopias we now live with: I was never happy with the cyberpunk trope where the old hacker who knows how the system really works can just breeze through modern security as though it’s not there- How could a whole world accept ‘modern security’ from people with no grounding in fundamentals? Completely implausible. 😞

Open ##3518316