I remember similar articles in the 80s and 90s bemoaning how "programmers these days" didn't know how to use a protocol analyzer or logic probe, or didn't know that xor made for a faster register clear operation (or moveq for 68k fans), or any other number of esoteric trivia that, while useful in context, did not usually contribute significantly towards a programmer's ability to get the job done.
My first debugger was an in-circuit-emulator for a Z80. It was the size of a small television set, had a crappy UI, and limited functionality. Today's debuggers can be hosted on the system itself, and have become so powerful that most people don't know how to use them to maximum effect (myself included). IDEs check your code as you type. No more writing something in VI, compiling, tracking down the cryptic error messages your compiler spat out and trying to figure out where the REAL error is because the compiler is dumb. You're shielded from the ugliness underneath, and for 99.9% of cases that's more than enough.
Do "kids these days" really need to know the sound of a hard drive dying? The last drive I heard going bad was in the 90s. Since then drives have become so quiet that you'd need a stethoscope to even hear the arm thrashing (which is why I use RAID). And how useful is the knowledge that you can open up a frozen drive and spin it up with your finger going to be as disks are replaced by SSDs?
We live in the future, where things have gotten a LOT better. Do the new batch of developers really need to know assembly language? After moving to "fluffy" languages, I only twice found need to use it (once to disassemble a stack dump from a JNI crash, and once to monkey patch a buggy device driver). Twice in all my years since using Java, Python, PHP, Objective-C, Scheme, COBOL, VB, and C#. Was it damn handy to have the right skill at an opportune time? Hell yeah. Does EVERYONE need this skill? Hell no.
How about bit packing? Memory has become so cheap and plentiful that even routers come with 16MB or more. Beyond low level networking and peripheral protocols, what use is there in packing up bits and coming up with clever encoding schemes that make for complicated (and potentially buggy) codec routines? Saving one byte in a packet header is hardly the triumph it once was.
All the "kids these days" need to know is their algorithms, profiling, debugging, multithreading issues, and how to write well structured, maintainable code in their paradigm of choice. The rest is usually industry specific, and can be learned as-you-go.
I remember similar articles in the 80s and 90s bemoaning how "programmers these days" didn't know how to use a protocol analyzer or logic probe, or didn't know that xor made for a faster register clear operation (or moveq for 68k fans), or any other number of esoteric trivia that, while useful in context, did not usually contribute significantly towards a programmer's ability to get the job done.
My first debugger was an in-circuit-emulator for a Z80. It was the size of a small television set, had a crappy UI, and limited functionality. Today's debuggers can be hosted on the system itself, and have become so powerful that most people don't know how to use them to maximum effect (myself included). IDEs check your code as you type. No more writing something in VI, compiling, tracking down the cryptic error messages your compiler spat out and trying to figure out where the REAL error is because the compiler is dumb. You're shielded from the ugliness underneath, and for 99.9% of cases that's more than enough.
Do "kids these days" really need to know the sound of a hard drive dying? The last drive I heard going bad was in the 90s. Since then drives have become so quiet that you'd need a stethoscope to even hear the arm thrashing (which is why I use RAID). And how useful is the knowledge that you can open up a frozen drive and spin it up with your finger going to be as disks are replaced by SSDs?
We live in the future, where things have gotten a LOT better. Do the new batch of developers really need to know assembly language? After moving to "fluffy" languages, I only twice found need to use it (once to disassemble a stack dump from a JNI crash, and once to monkey patch a buggy device driver). Twice in all my years since using Java, Python, PHP, Objective-C, Scheme, COBOL, VB, and C#. Was it damn handy to have the right skill at an opportune time? Hell yeah. Does EVERYONE need this skill? Hell no.
How about bit packing? Memory has become so cheap and plentiful that even routers come with 16MB or more. Beyond low level networking and peripheral protocols, what use is there in packing up bits and coming up with clever encoding schemes that make for complicated (and potentially buggy) codec routines? Saving one byte in a packet header is hardly the triumph it once was.
All the "kids these days" need to know is their algorithms, profiling, debugging, multithreading issues, and how to write well structured, maintainable code in their paradigm of choice. The rest is usually industry specific, and can be learned as-you-go.
Don't worry about the kids. The kids are alright.