> These days 17 year olds can get away with "programming" by gluing things they don't understand
17 to 21-ish is probably my least gluey era of programming. I wrote an MVC framework from scratch, built my own interpreter, my own compiler, accidentally tried to reinvent machine learning and NLP from scratch, all sorts of cool and wonderful things.
Then I discovered money and prior art. Wow you can build things so much faster if you let others tell you “here, just use this”! And frameworks!! Omg jquery makes life so much easier this is amazing.
Many years later now, the stuff that used to count as “just gluing things together” is now considered “super low level advanced stuff”. We’ve built new abstractions on top of those abstractions.
The stuff beginners “can get away with” now, that’s the next generation’s super low level here be dragons stuff. Programming is great that way.
Programming was more fun before I learned how to import libraries. So many things I wrote from scratch... JSON parsers, distributed K/V stores, optimization algorithms, UI frameworks etc. From 17-21 nobody expected me to be Uber-productive so I just kind of went off and coded these things from scratch for months at a time. Good times.
17 to 21-ish is probably my least gluey era of programming. I wrote an MVC framework from scratch, built my own interpreter, my own compiler, accidentally tried to reinvent machine learning and NLP from scratch, all sorts of cool and wonderful things.
Then I discovered money and prior art. Wow you can build things so much faster if you let others tell you “here, just use this”! And frameworks!! Omg jquery makes life so much easier this is amazing.
Many years later now, the stuff that used to count as “just gluing things together” is now considered “super low level advanced stuff”. We’ve built new abstractions on top of those abstractions.
The stuff beginners “can get away with” now, that’s the next generation’s super low level here be dragons stuff. Programming is great that way.