No, it’s recognizing that tinkering means different things now.
In the 80s and 90s, if you were learning computers you had no choice but to understand how the physical machine worked and how software interacted with it. Understanding the operating system, and scripting was required for essentially any task that wasn’t in the narrow collection of tasks where there was commercial software. There was essentially one path (or a bunch of paths that were closely related to each other) for people interested in computers.
That just isn’t the case now. There are more options available and many (most?) of them are built on top of software that abstracts away the underlying complexity. Now, a person can use technology and never need to understand how it works. Smartphones are an excellent example of this. People learn to use iOS or Android without ever knowing how it works, they deal with the abstractions instead of the underlying bits that were used to create it.
For example, If you want to play games, you press a button in Steam and it installs. If you want to stream your gaming session to millions of people, you install OBS and enter your Twitch credentials. You don’t need to understand graphical pipelines, codecs, networking, load balancing, or worry about creating client-side applications for your users. Everything is already created for you.
There are more options available in technology and it is completely expected that people distribute themselves amongst those options.
I get that, I’m not saying differently, I’m just saying that it’s not like the only reason people were learning lower level things was only to play games. Some people were just curious about it. Plenty of people are still learning those things because they’re curious. The barrier to entry being lower doesn’t mean there are less people who are curious about learning! If anything, it means that people who are curious but thought the barrier to entry was higher in the past have an easier time getting into the hobby now.
Do you think that the Arduino project has been a net negative for people curious about learning low level microcontroller stuff? It was created out of frustration by people learning it wanting it to be easier to begin to learn. https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-making-of-arduino
No, it’s recognizing that tinkering means different things now.
In the 80s and 90s, if you were learning computers you had no choice but to understand how the physical machine worked and how software interacted with it. Understanding the operating system, and scripting was required for essentially any task that wasn’t in the narrow collection of tasks where there was commercial software. There was essentially one path (or a bunch of paths that were closely related to each other) for people interested in computers.
That just isn’t the case now. There are more options available and many (most?) of them are built on top of software that abstracts away the underlying complexity. Now, a person can use technology and never need to understand how it works. Smartphones are an excellent example of this. People learn to use iOS or Android without ever knowing how it works, they deal with the abstractions instead of the underlying bits that were used to create it.
For example, If you want to play games, you press a button in Steam and it installs. If you want to stream your gaming session to millions of people, you install OBS and enter your Twitch credentials. You don’t need to understand graphical pipelines, codecs, networking, load balancing, or worry about creating client-side applications for your users. Everything is already created for you.
There are more options available in technology and it is completely expected that people distribute themselves amongst those options.
config.sys generation represent.
We got extended memory now! Bill gates doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
I get that, I’m not saying differently, I’m just saying that it’s not like the only reason people were learning lower level things was only to play games. Some people were just curious about it. Plenty of people are still learning those things because they’re curious. The barrier to entry being lower doesn’t mean there are less people who are curious about learning! If anything, it means that people who are curious but thought the barrier to entry was higher in the past have an easier time getting into the hobby now.
Do you think that the Arduino project has been a net negative for people curious about learning low level microcontroller stuff? It was created out of frustration by people learning it wanting it to be easier to begin to learn. https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-making-of-arduino