When I read things like this, I end up feeling a lot of sympathy for kids who are trying to learn programming and "computers" nowadays. I count myself as very fortunate that I started learning programming back in the 80's when not much was expected out of computers, since they were so (relatively) underpowered. I feel like I was able to learn programming concepts at a much more leisurely pace than you're expected to learn nowadays. My first real computer was a commodore 64 - completely self contained, no internet, no GUI, and something you could really understand from beginning to end after a few months of study. When I started learning more complex architectures and things like virtual memory and pointers, I had a solid base to fall back on that I don't think this younger generation is allowed.
This is a good point—I see a bunch of people overwhelmed nowadays on forums about languages, frameworks, paradigms, ideas, etc. So many! I know we say "just pick one, it doesn't matter" but still, not an easy choice.
I picked up programming after degrees in Mechanical and Chemical engineering, wanting to understand things more than make something immediately marketable, and I've been feeling this way for a while.
Reading "Masters of Doom" I couldn't help but feel that the technical constraints that existed at the time bred craftsmanship that seems hard to justify these days. Still trying, though.
At the same time, the counterpoint is of course that the 80s (and 90s for most) really required you to read a lot of books. There wasn't really any coding boot camps, tutorials (as they are today), pluralsight etc etc and the chances of meeting another accomplished programmer in real life was fairly low.
Some of the books from back then were much higher quality than what you get today. By reading Kernighan/Ritchie and Stroustrup's books and understanding them you could get a pretty deep understanding of C/C++. Most of the material available today seems pretty superficial in comparison. Maybe that's because back then you had a decent shot at understanding the whole stack and now there are just too many choices
Actually these kids should be reading all those same books. Coding bootcamps, tutorials, stack overflow and cut-and-paste are the reason there are so many solutions that nobody actually understands.
