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Vitaly L
ThePrimeTime
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Comments by "Vitaly L" (@vitalyl1327) on "I Feel Bad For New Programmers" video.

@possumkeys and these days even assembly can be too high level and too distant from the actual microarchitecture of your CPU. Learning an assembly on an 8bit MCU can be far more beneficial for understanding of how things work than learning an x86_64 or aarch64 assembly.
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Interesting, you really seem to believe that C is a very low level language. It is not. Not any more. Not since PDP11. It is very far from how real CPUs work.
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 @SolidWorksMastery-hr4sg can you imagine what kind of utterly crappy job it is if a bootcamp graduate is fit for it?
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There is a natural difficulty in many real-world problems. When faced with such, both cowboy engineers with a tendency to overcomplicate things and superficially learnt monkeys are equally helpless, and only those with a thorough findamental knowledge thrive.
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Ever seen a rotating drum memory?
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@moonasha machine code is a representation of the same assembly, you're not learning anything new from it. Instructions are still going to be executed in extremely convoluted ways, not in a sequence you wrote them, split into microinstructions you don't even have a chance to know anything about. The better way to learn is to dissect something like nand4tetris, my4th or Ptoject Oberon, where you'll understand exactly how instructions are executed. Or, if assembly is as low as you want to get, do it with some very simple MCU.
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@jordixboy some people have an ability (and a desire) to build systematic knowledge, starting from the first principles and leaving no gaps. The others just memorise (believing they "learned" something) a random assortment of factoids from some easy high level subjects, and then they get confused when presented with a slightly harder problem or just something new. Don't be like them. Learn things properly. Even if it hurts.
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@anon1963 this is a wrong analpgy.
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Going top down is an extremely bad idea and it is going to leave you with an awful lot of gaps that you won't even be able to detect, making you very prone to Dunning-Kruger.
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@possumkeys if the car breaks down the guy who built it waits for mechanics just like the others, but knowing how did it break and how to fix it if only he had his workshop with tools.
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@DemiImp yet, C does not teach you how computers work. C is too far away from hardware. Yes, it worth learning, as its abstract model is useful, but one should not stop there.
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@LukasCobbler I can recommend Project Oberon - a minimalistic computer built from scratch, with an OS and compiler also built from scratch and still small enough for one person to comprehend in a few months.
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@jordixboy how many bootcamp or self-taught surgeons or civil engineers you know?
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@filippomenchini even algorithms and data structures are affected significantly by the language properties. See, for example, how different the cost analysis theory is for purely functional data structures (e.g., as in C. Okasaki book) from the mutable data structures. I'd put theory of computation first, before everything else, and from there it's natural to move to algorithms and data structures, to formal languages, to computer architecture, all on top of a solid and coherent basis. As for linguistic relativism, Dijkstra had something to say about consequences of starting with Basic :)
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@randerins funny generation of bootcamp "graduates" who now believe that web is UI. Ever heard of SWING?
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A lot less people went into this field motivated by money or glamour, only those who had a genuine interest (speaking of late 80s/early 90s). Of course, even then this "minimal viable learning" attitude existed, just was not so widespread.
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Even better, don't pick a framework for frontend stuff, and ignore all the web insanity altogether, frontend and backend alike. You'll have a more fun and fulfilling career this way.
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@VuxGameplays wtf are you talking about? I am in the field for more than thirty years, and never once touched the web, not a single tiny thing. Most of the people I work with also never did anything related to web. Why new developers believe that there is nothing but web?
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Yes. Pretty much everything in the modern computing is overengineered beyond any measure. And not a small part of this is thanks to the self-taught and otherwise insufficiently trained engineers who know no better.
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@KyleSmithNH yes, it's better than sticking to even higher level than C indeed. What I'm saying is that it's not enough to get a comprehensive and systematic understanding. It's an important step, but not sufficient.
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@DemiImp I am talking about generic knowledge, transferable across platforms, which can only be gained by studying one platform (probably a toy one) thoroughly. Things like ABIs, registers and register spills, caches, cost of memory accesss, atomics, memory operations order, pipelines, effect of scheduling on IPC, alignment, SIMD/SPMD, and many more
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@filippomenchini Tell Sapir and Whorf that language is not important :) Yes, you need to learn fundamental CS. And it includes learning computer architecture too. Which implies learning the low level languages, HDLs and many more.
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The problem here, they don't get the job done. They produce utter crap that can superficially pass if you don't look at it too closely, then crumble at a first attempt to use it as intended in production.
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You'll end up with glaring gaps in your understanding, and without any ways of even figuring out where those gaps are.
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Do you realise how far Java is from the basics?
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@VuxGameplays he was talking about new developers in general. It's just that everyone default development to web development, which is funny and unnecessary.
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@nezu_cc I did a ton of different things in the last three decades. That included scientific compute (analysing experimental data from CERN), along with building those detectors and hardware/software triggers for them, working on specialised CAD engine for ship building, working on compilers for GPGPU along with GPU hardware design, working on video compression and low latency video communication, high-frequency trading, industrial robotics. People I worked with had, of course, different paths, they worked in areas from game development to embedded automotive / aerospace, medical robotics, and many many more areas. Dozens and dozes. The world does not revolve around web. Web is the least interesting domain in IT, yet for some weird reason every new developer gravitate towards it.
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@VuxGameplays there is a whole huge world outside of web. System development - operating systems, compilers, DBMS engines, etc. Embedded development - real-time, control, safety, etc., telecomms, robotics, HPC, CAD/CAE, automation in general, and many many more exciting and fun areas.
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@CallousCoder there is no innovation in overengineering, it stems exactly from people not knowing what to do and applying a few tricks they know to build systems that should have been built from the very different blocks. They try to sledgehammer their few known methods into every hole they see, and it results in an ever growing complexity. Academics have a tendency for building systems based on the first principles, and much less inclined to overengineer things. Also, there's a bit of a culture and management problem here - for example, in Amazon the only way up is to create a new "product" and apply political pressure to push it. Resulting in literally hundreds re-implementations of the same old crap, competing with each other end eventually bestowed upon poor customers in cycles. Google is a little bit better than that, but still does a similar thing. I know quite a few people who escaped FAANG exactly because of their disdain for this culture.
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Too late. Bootcampers already inflicted a lot of damage and it will be hard to reverse it.
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Do people who do not find it motivating and rewarding really should even be in this profession?
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Not really. Things are still manageable, if you just ditch all the overengineered crap that bootcampers and self-taughts defecated over the years. There's very little value in all those layers upon layers of overengineered abstraction, and you'll be better of without them.
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These are not "basics" in a slightest, still insanely high level
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And this is why "frontend devs" do not matter. They don't know what they are doing and don't want to know what they are doing, resulting in layers upon layers of overengineeting, and an overall crappy results on all levels. I am rejoicing at a perspective of all the code monkeys being kicked out of work by the glorified markov chains. It is going to be utterly delightful.
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Do you realise how high an abstraction level is for this "very simple HTML/CSS/PHP", and how needlessly far it all is from what is actually happening in hardware?
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If solving problems and achieving an understanding of how things work is not rewarding enough for you, probably programming is not going to be fun for you at all. It's not for everyone.
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@jirkasimecek You realise that chances are, there are hundreds of projects just like yours anyway? Not to mention that you can build new and exciting things on a very low level too.
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This was supposed to be a hint for you to stay away from those companies. You would not want to work for someone who have no idea what they're doing, would you?
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The thing with knowing the very fundamentals is that once you have a solid understanding, there's not really that much more to learn and it's not that scary. You'll realise that there is nothing new, that all the hype cycles repeat over and over again, that there was no innovation whatsoever in IT in the last couple of decades. The field becomes small and comfy, once you see where things are coming from.
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 @YeetYeetYe so, you're a bottom of a barrel and an awful engineer. You'll be among the first to be replaced by glorified stochastic parrots, because even they are better than you.
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@jordixboy No, you can get a delusion that you "learned" something "FREELY and on your OWN". In the vast majority of cases those who fell to this delusion did not really learn anything. They memorised a few unrelated facts and tricks, and it left them with mythical thinking, not a systematic knowledge. One can argue that you can learn medicine the same way, just go to a library and read all the books. Spoiler alert: you cannot. You'll get an assortment of unrelated facts and you'll fail to acquire a systematic knowledge. In any domain, in any discipline one must be guided in order to get this system, to be able to link all pieces of knowledge together and to start producing new coherent knowledge. CS is not any different. And I firmly believe that software engineering must also introduce the same very strict regulations as civil engineering, for the safety reasons. This world runs on software, and we hear about crap software written by uneducated monkeys wreaking havoc on a daily basis. All those personal data leaks, falling to crypto-lockers, the recent NATS debacle, and so on. We need to keep all the incapable ones out of this profession, and start regulating it rigorously.
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@Zer-ei4co have you heard of the recent air traffic control debacle? That's why. This industry must be purged of low quality trash and very strict standards must be imposed. There are far too many awful programmers, and they are causing far too much damage. We'll be better off with 1/100 the number of developers, but with only the prpper high quality engineers left.
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@Zer-ei4co it is not an "elitism" when there is a very real elite and an insane difference between the elite and the maggots.
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@milanpospisil8024 sorry to break it for you, but for those who have fundamental knowledge there are no "new things" in IT. Nothing new was invented in the last couple of decades. Everything is just a crappy rehash of the same old things that were tried and discarded a few times before. You can be genuinely confounded by the "fast moving" and "ever changing" world of IT, while us greybeards just giggle at your confusion. Learn the fundamentals and there will be no "new things" for you too.
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@milanpospisil8024 those "new" libraries and frameworks always repeat the same old patterns over and over again. Nothing really new is happening. Yes, they're getting more and more ugly and overengineered, and the really smart thing to do is to simply ignore the vast majority of those libraries and frameworks, but if for some reason you're forced to use them - not really a problem, they're all the same. For the neural networks - hardware capabilities changed, making things practically useful that were previously only toys for researchers. But fundamentally nothing changed, really. Same goes for many other things - now compilers can employ optimisations that were only theorised previously, because they were too costly, and these days nobody cares about those costs. Good. But still nothing new and everything was described in the papers published in the 80s.
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@lordmoma2025 if you went a little bit further and learned how MMU work, about supervisors / monitors, about the hardware VMs, all from the first principles, Docker would have been a trivial concept for you.
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@Muskar2 and this is exactly why you need to understand the levels lower than C - to be able to use it (and everything above it) to its maximum potential.
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@DemiImp I am talking about learning computer architecture and studying at least one platform (even if it is a toy one) thoroughly, for it is the only way to understand performance implications of things you do in high level languages such as C. Also, I believe learning Forth can be extremely beneficial for everyone, including very high level languages users.
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@DemiImp you explained why 99% of the developers suck and why 99.9% of the software written sucks. It is a form of Dunning-Kruger effect - they write slow and buggy code and don't even realise that they're doing it wrong. But why do you think it should be like this? I believe, those 99% of developers need to be kicked out of this industry and go flip burgers and mop floors, since even glorified stochastic parrots can do their job better.
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@halorx9863 now try again, in English. What you just said makes no sense. Assembly language is a thin layer of mnemonic syntax parsed directly into machine code, with some.rudimentary macros support and labels address calculation (often delegated to later linking).
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This is how it feels for everyone learning top to bottom. When you learn bottom up, every new thing is just a tiny addition on a pile of existing solid knowledge. Those who learnt thr wrong way cannot connect new topic to an existing knowledge, since this knowledge is hollow. Bottom up is the only right way, it is so weird people are even arguing otherwise.
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Just do nand2tetris, it will guide you through the hard stuff. Also, read the "Code" by Petzold.
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@aarondanen3150 the best way to learn how C compilers work is to write one. Gcc is insanely huge and complex, a compiler can be much simpler - see lcc, tcc for example.
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@LifeWithRilla you realise that a lot of FAANG engineers are trash? You should have guessed from the quality of their products. Also, no, I don't have any college debts, I got my education many years ago, in the Soviet Union, for free. I suspect you're one of those uneducated self-proclaimed engineers, right? I'm sorry for breaking the news to you, but you're not an engineer. Self-taughts are not engineers. Bootcamp grads are not engineers. A tiny minority of them manage to get to a level comparable to the proper engineers, but even they are deeply flawed.
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@stevezelaznik5872 2 months of fundamentals vs. 4 years of fundamentals a STEM graduate should get? Right. That'd be definitely enough...
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 @cat-le1hf ROTFL, you're funny. Tell me the name of a bootcamp which graduates can take my job - I'll hire them all!
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@cat-le1hf also, do you realise that the "most jobs" that are suitable for bootcamp dummies can and will be taken by a glorified Markov chain? And it's delightful.
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Because if you're using abstractions you don't understand over layers you don't know anything about, you're unavoidably will produce an utter crap. Abstractions are only useful when thoroughly understood.
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You can also make modern art piece with sh*t. It'll still be a sh*t, but people will queue to smell it.
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