What is a file, what is a program, how programs run and how programs communicate, is not understood by most people (including most CS students).
> Honestly I don't find that too bad.
I understand what you mean, it is the same with most technology, users just use it, as your example of cars, or even furniture, or forks and spoons, or language, I am not even sure it is related to complexity.
But I disagree on what it means to use a computer, because unlike other machines, it does what you make of it (now even more, with llama 3.1 out), I think to use a computer means to program it. Somehow in the last 30-40 years, user interfaces gave up on their users. You dont own your programs, your files or in many cases even your computer, it doesnt start the programs you want(iphone for example), and you cant debug other programs (e.g. in case of macos you cant gdb -p into signed programs unless you disable the system's integrity protection).
Somehow we managed to squeeze all the fun out of it. As John Carmack says: the distance between what it is, and what it could be, is the opportunity, and I am sure people can have way more fun programming :)
The first class of my CS degree was "How to use Microsoft Word" and some of the other students had a really, really hard time figuring this out. Including the guy next to me who kept telling me he had a job lined up already to write software for nuclear reactors in Pascal.
Great fun with the autocorrected Unicode double quotes.
A customer of mine got bitten on a preproduction server because of a copy and paste from some blog, where ASCII " were converted to Unicode (slanted) "
Why would using a fancy editor be in any way relevant to writing code? That CS class should be dropped from the curriculum, imo, until such time as bolding a register has some sort of meaning, or perhaps viewing an sql table via "print preview".
What is a file, what is a program, how programs run and how programs communicate, is not understood by most people (including most CS students).
> Honestly I don't find that too bad.
I understand what you mean, it is the same with most technology, users just use it, as your example of cars, or even furniture, or forks and spoons, or language, I am not even sure it is related to complexity.
But I disagree on what it means to use a computer, because unlike other machines, it does what you make of it (now even more, with llama 3.1 out), I think to use a computer means to program it. Somehow in the last 30-40 years, user interfaces gave up on their users. You dont own your programs, your files or in many cases even your computer, it doesnt start the programs you want(iphone for example), and you cant debug other programs (e.g. in case of macos you cant gdb -p into signed programs unless you disable the system's integrity protection).
Somehow we managed to squeeze all the fun out of it. As John Carmack says: the distance between what it is, and what it could be, is the opportunity, and I am sure people can have way more fun programming :)
This commodore 64 user guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9WnHuGjZ38 is my inspiration.