Thread: Are students getting dumber or is the site getting more popular?

Excellent observations, brewbuck!

I remember being surprised years ago when I read about how human beings were no longer mapping out the entire structures of central processing units anymore because these structures had become too complex for even a team of human engineers to fathom without computer assistance. As far as what the future may hold, even great minds like Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy have taken note of Theodore Kaczynski's technological projections, which basically paint a very dark picture.

There is a small chance that those in the future who retain your type of knowledge may change things in a good way. However, I agree; the vast majority of the population would be at the mercy of the whims of those technologists. If they turn out to be as self-serving as the current financial elite, then the world is in for an ugly surprise.

As far as our educational system, and the current abilities of students who enrolled to gain a degree in computer science: where's the science in copy-and-pasting? Our students probably aren't as dumb as they are just plain lazy and spoiled by instant everything.

We have experienced this elite before and not so long ago. From the 60s, well into the 80s and early 90s, when the difficulty in finding qualified programmers and engineers turned many of us-- who were in the job market at that time -- into rocket scientists, while increasing profits of small and big businesses alike (particularly ISVs) on the basis of consumer misinformation. The dot-com bubble of the middle 90s was what happened when this elite met with investors.

The world didn't implode then and it shouldn't in the future. However it needs to be said that the lessening of the numbers is partly due to the dissemination of higher level languages that in themselves represent the tremendous success of computer sciences in abstracting the complexities of a computer system into a workable programming language. The people that made this success possible were/are only a few. And this will not change. Low level perception of computer systems has always been a rather lonely field. I don't think it ever increased much in comparison to the growing masses of high level programmers.

I can understand your concerns, brewbuck. But we have been evolving systems in a very rapid pace, making them ever more complex. The reality of our software needs today is nowhere near what it was 20 years ago. The powerful abstractions of higher level languages are currently the only possible way to deal with most software requirements these days, and yet you are already risking years of development time and development teams with tenths of programmers to comply to a single project nowadays. Low level knowledge becomes accessory. There's very little practical motivation for that low level knowledge on the masses. It is required though, but I think it will become more and more a specialized area and less and less a target for geeks.