Written by brian_houghton on Friday, March 26, 2010

QOTD: Will the Over-Simplification of Today’s Technology Harm the Technologies of the Future?


QOTD: Will the Over-Simplification of Today’s Technology Harm the Technologies of the Future?

A very scary thought has occurred to me.  With various operating systems, both desktop and handheld, moving towards simplification so that anyone can use them with little to no learning curve, are we doing a disservice to future technologies?

If no one has to get under the hood of the current operating system to tweak and fix it, to look at ways to make it better, what happens to growth?  If developers are left stagnating because they can’t truly get in and develop at the root level of the OS, what happens to tomorrow’s coders?

It scares me… how about you?

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Anonymous
Mar 26, 2010

It already is, in terms of students studying fields like computer science or computer engineering. In the past, students entering these fields had some basic background knowledge–like how to use a computer, figure things out, etc. Now, that is less the case. And they don’t already know binary or hexadecimal anymore either. So it definitely slows down the educational process.

Plus, there’s this story: a colleague told students to enter a particular command at the command line to run the application they needed for the class. One student had trouble – they said they got a 404 error. They’d never heard of a command line, and the only place they knew to type was the address bar in their browser! This was a 3rd year *computer engineering* student.

– A professor of computer engineering.

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