I don't know. I was born in 1980 and first got into programming as a young kid on an 8-bit Apple ][, and basically kept tinkering and coding through successive generations of computers as they became available. No stackoverflow or online tutorials - just books, magazines, and trial-and-error until the light bulb finally went off and you suddenly grokked pointers :)
I started interacting with other like-minded nerds via local BBSes, and first experienced the internet through a dial-up UNIX shell account from a local ISP.
Computers today are great - but you can do quite a bit of programming without understanding how anything really works. Will programmers who grew up with 64-bit machines, GUIs, always-on internet connections and very high-level programming languages be as good as the 80s kids?
Who knows? Do they even need to be? Most technology companies don't seem to think so based on their hiring practices.
> Computers today are great - but you can do quite a bit of programming without understanding how anything really works.
Did the "computer kids" of the 80s understand the quantum field effects that make transistors work, and how they are physically arranged to emulate logic gates, complete with all the subtle tricks needed to manage signal noise?
If not, that comment is just ignorance dressed up in elitism. All of computing is based on abstraction, and understanding how it "really works" has been beyond the capability of any single individual for many decades.
I started interacting with other like-minded nerds via local BBSes, and first experienced the internet through a dial-up UNIX shell account from a local ISP.
Computers today are great - but you can do quite a bit of programming without understanding how anything really works. Will programmers who grew up with 64-bit machines, GUIs, always-on internet connections and very high-level programming languages be as good as the 80s kids?
Who knows? Do they even need to be? Most technology companies don't seem to think so based on their hiring practices.