Honestly I see more and more abstraction layers added and from year to year less people understanding how a computer and some algorithms works. In the end it would be like the mechanicum or whatever the name was of the w40k universum where the specialists have not a damn clue how their creations (in our case software) works and how to optimize it anymore

Or like Battletech ComStar. 😊 (need the right prayer to send a message)

People can quickly start from the top of the turtle tower.
Unfortunately they will never understand what they are "really" doing, if they never climb down the tower.

That is why I totally spring for beginning with C. First learn the basics, and then they can jump on any tower they want.

You’re 100% right. Same goes for the internet.

I think that this is necessary.

Like when you are making donuts, you don't care how to make flour and optimize its process. Yes, it would benefit donuts if flour was better and/or cheaper, but it is proven that specialization increases efficiency, so baker usually doesn't do farming. So while his donuts are not perfect, they can be the best with materials available, because baker could invest all his time into baking donuts, not caring about other stuff. Someone else will take care of that, even tho it is possible that you could do "best used for baking donuts" flour. In fact, we do have several kinds of flour, so maybe there is one like that.

For now, what we develop isn't really that complex if you think about what we will likely have in 100, 200, 1000 years. Do you really expect people to know every single transistor, assembly and other stuff while developing/maintaining things that in C would have had billions of lines of code? I don't think so.

@arraysstartat1 But you are not making donuts. No one will die if you buy flower that was not fetilised for maximum utility. However, if you build a bridge and you are not aware of the material consequences of what you have chosen for whatever component, people may die. Are you a software cook or are you are a software engineer?

@MoonOwl Sure, but I have material properties already calculated. I do not have to check how that brick was made and find those properties myself. I will likely design bridge in some kind of software that will tell me what properties are required of materials used for this specific construction and usage of bride, so then I just write "get steel rods with diameter X, stiffness Z and whatever else there is in construction". I will not do this by myself. It might have been done in the past or even now on simple and cheap constructions, but I highly doubt that any important and complex construction is being done on paper those days.

@arraysstartat1 You are not wrong. I went with w40k because I am afraid of a world where we can no longer reproduce the technology. Not because we don't have the tools, but because we don't have the knowledge anymore. I mean even today one can still learn assembler. But imagine a world where we are no longer even able to learn it anymore, because we as humans at some point startet tinkering with ai supported machine code generators. There is already software in use which gives us so much abstraction that we not always know how it will respond. Now imagine a world where we lost the technology and knowhow to explore those underlaying structures. We would be fully dependend on said piece of technology and would probably not even know how to work (live) without it anymore.