To stay on computer science analogies, this reminds me of the principle of abstraction. When you call an API, it sort of feels like magic. A task gets done, and you trust that it was done correctly, and that saves you the time of controlling the code and rewriting it from scratch. “We have only to think out how this is to be done once, and forget then how it is done.” (A. Turing, 1947).
vlad.proex
Karma: 211
Forcing Freedom
Thank you for the welcome and the feedback! Yes, I am set on deepening my engagement with Reality and tackling more practical tasks. I also want to work on keeping score on my judgments and getting better at detecting & analysing my mistakes. I will definitely write more about it when the moment comes.
The general trend has been to make computers user-friendly, and to hide the complexity from the user. On one hand, this has been helpful for their diffusion, and I’m sure it benefited a lot of people in a lot of ways (besides making a lot of money). If I think of my parents, for instance, I can’t believe they would have ever started to use computers had they been more complicated.
On the other hand, this might be the fundamental obstacle in the way of coding literacy. To do stuff in the modern world, you actually have to know how to read and write. To use computers, you don’t need to know how to program (at the level that most people use them). If computers keep getting more intuitive, interactive and user friendly, why should people feel the need to understand them?
(One could imagine a future where technology is so attuned to people’s intentions, they can just think, gesture or say what they want, and the machine provides; as a result, they lose interest in reading and writing, and a new dark age of illiteracy begins).