"This thing #{X} that I am inexperienced at is much harder than this thing #{Y} I spent years doing because I am experienced at #{Y} and have some idea how to do it and thus it feels comfortable.
Why, I am going to go so far as to talk down everybody who still does #{Y}, partly because I'm somewhat burnt out on it, and partly because my comparative experience makes me feel like it's easy compared to #{X}."
Where:-
* X, Y are very broad fields in which there is a whole range of tasks which span from the very simple to the insanely difficult,
* X, Y both revolutionised the world at different points in human history, X before Y.
Programmers' world is populated with very abstract concepts that they use to reason and draw conclusions. I think this post discuss the applicability of this reasoning outside of the virtual sphere.
So assigning farming to #{X}, programming to #{Y} and then reasoning over X and Y without considering the reality of farming and programming is surely not the proper way to address this problem.
In other words, I disagree and I think this post is interesting.
My point is that the OP and his father are making value judgments - firstly the title, secondly:-
"Growing food is far more challenging, requires an order of magnitude more knowledge and continuous learning and dedication."
Problems I have with this:-
* First and foremost, this is a pissing match. A better way of putting this might have been 'I found this more challenging, etc.' instead of some sweeping divisive comparison.
* It's meaningless - programming and farming are massive fields, what exactly are we comparing? Farming carrots in my allotment vs. a modern industrial farm. Hello world in qbasic vs. the linux kernel. Etc. etc. etc...
What's frustrating is that there are some really interesting points about, as you say, the real world applications of things, abstractness of programming, etc., but it's hidden below this unnecessary grumpy attack stuff.
Of course there's the just very grumpy:-
"Why are programmers granted such high status and wealth in our society for living in a self-created self-indulgant intellectual world of constant escapism"
Well, SpaceX did escape the atmosphere using some self-created self-indulgent intellectualisms ;-)
I've been involved in farming for most of my life and now, as an adult, have my own operation. I also program professionally. With considerable experience in both, I still think farming is the more challenging of the two and believe that farming does require more problem solving over a wide range of disciplines.
When the whole learn to code push came to my attention, I also wondered if farming would be a better option for achieving the claimed goals.
farming does require more problem solving over a wide range of disciplines
Does it make sense to compare the two that way? Farming is a an activity that has problems to be solved, programming is a method of solving problems - including farming related ones. Sure, farming has more and more diverse problems to be solved compared to pure programming problems (i.e., CS), but almost every programmer solves problems in other domains, and those are almost infinite.
That is a great question. I guess it depends if the purpose is to learn how to solve problems, or how to use a tool that can solve a certain class of problems.
If it is the latter, I do wonder why single out coding? Coming with a programmer bias, I often feel like I could do a lot more useful automations in my life if I had more electronic and mechanical skills. There are many disciplines that seem just as useful that students would gain a lot from being exposed to, not just coding.
Sure, but we're programmers, so we advocate coding! That doesn't detract from EEs advocating for electronic skills or farmers advocating for agriculture skills. We don't all need to push everything.
X indeed revolutionised the world. Y just made porn delivery and commerce better. It's not even clear at this point if it had any effect (besides negative) to the global intellectual climate.
Ok, this is a real low for HN. Are you actually saying that the only thing computing has done for the world is better porn delivery and better commerce? Wow. Do you have any idea how we managed to decode our genome so fast? Any idea that every science labs including maths have computers to test their hypothesis and solve their equations at such a huge scale and speed no human being could possibly dream to match? How about communication? How about almost anything you use today to make your life easier has a computer chip in it? How about making the bulk of human knowledge available to anyone with an internet connection even in remote poor areas of the world where adults can barely read such as Peru where I lived for years? I could go on but I think you get the idea.
>Ok, this is a real low for HN. Are you actually saying that the only thing computing has done for the world is better porn delivery and better commerce? Wow. Do you have any idea how we managed to decode our genome so fast? Any idea that every science labs including maths have computers to test their hypothesis and solve their equations at such a huge scale and speed no human being could possibly dream to match? How about communication? How about almost anything you use today to make your life easier has a computer chip in it?
Making my life slightly easier is not that important -- and hardly what I'd call a world changing event in the scale of agricultural revolution or even the industrial revolution.
I understand that as CS people we like to sing our own praises, but just like once you have electric ovens, getting a microwave is not that big of progress (if it's not a throwback to a worse method of heating), similarly, once you have global trade routes, ships, trains, cars, snail mail, telegraphs and telephones, having computerised version of communication is not that much of a step forward.
The world is not that different, including everyday life, from 40 years ago, when computers were mostly unknown outside of large companies. We just play more videogames, watch more cat videos, and exchange more (than zero) BS instant messages and mails. Quantitative is not qualitative difference.
As for the use of computers in science: again, quantitative is not qualitative difference. The most involved and mind-boggling discoveries were done before computers, from evolution, to relativity, to quantum mechanics, to the DNA. We are now better at number crunching (such as decoding the genome), that doesn't mean we produce science of equal impact.
So you're saying that computers and computer science didn't revolutionize the world? They just made people's lives "slightly easier"?
What about free instant communication with people who live halfway around the world?
What about massive knowledge bases like Wikipedia that never existed on this scale in the past?
What about search engines that make every piece of knowledge available to humanity instantly available to you?
What about having access to all of that in a small device in your pocket?
I really don't know if you're trolling or you're just being obtuse. If the only benefit you've been able to get from all this wonderful technology is watching porn and cat videos, then that says more about you than it does about the technology.
>I really don't know if you're trolling or you're just being obtuse.
So, people "not getting it" are either obtuse or trolls? I'm over thirty -- not some teenager making internet pranks. As such, I don't troll. I say what I believe. Can you fathom that people can have different standards about what it takes to call something "world-changing"?
Take a Buddhist monk as an extreme example of a different viewpoint. He wouldn't raise an eyebrow for trivial stuff like "instant communication" over the intertubes. Especially knowing the triviality of the majority of such communication. Heck, such a figure would be even unperturbed about normal communication (speaking), preferring meditating silence instead.
Now, I'm not a Buddhist monk. But I'm not a starry-eye millennial optimist either, nor I consider any and every technological advance "progress" in the full sense of the word.
For example, you say:
>What about free instant communication with people who live halfway around the world? What about massive knowledge bases like Wikipedia that never existed on this scale in the past? What about search engines that make every piece of knowledge available to humanity instantly available to you? What about having access to all of that in a small device in your pocket?
Yes, what about all those things? Any real effect on my everyday life?
E.g Has the instant availability of "every piece of knowledge available to humanity" to us made as any more clever? For some, it even made us stupider:
Even before "instant availability of everything", e.g even when availability was a problem itself, people knew that it wasn't about the availability but about the distinction. To put it in a little more archaic terms, that the important thing was wisdom, not information.
You're over thirty? I'm over fifty. And I have seen huge change in my every day life due to advances in communication. I still remember the first time I used email (summer of 82) and the first time I had a "chat" with a friend of mine who had moved to Germany (in 1986). Perhaps things have not changed significantly for you since you became aware of technology, but they certainly have for me and for countless of other people.
I've upvoted your posts, but claiming that computers did nothing more than improve delivery of porn and commerce is borderline trolling, particularly on HN. While I can agree that computing is often overpraised, there's still more to it than porn and commerce (e.g. being an indispensable tool in reaching other planets).
The last clause of your response doesn't make sense so maybe you're not responding to me, but just in case you were serious:
Snide yes, but BS no. The industrial revolution did nothing
to the quality of life compared to cooking food and scaring wild animals away. The point is that it takes more and more work to make meaningful progress. The low fruit has been picked. Minimizing the impact of computation is what is BS since there is almost no aspect of life and the economy that hasn't been greatly impacted by it.
> that doesn't mean we produce science of equal impact
Of course we do, we make amazing science at such a huge rate most people can't even keep up with it anymore. If you believe computing has only little and only "quantitative" impact on science and communication than there is little I can do for you, computing has completely revolutionized every single science field. But sure, keep thinking it's just cat videos and porn. Maybe we should just go farming instead...
>Of course we do, we make amazing science at such a huge rate most people can't even keep up with it anymore. If you believe computing has only little and only "quantitative" impact on science and communication than there is little I can do for you, computing has completely revolutionized every single science field. But sure, keep thinking it's just cat videos and porn. Maybe we should just go farming instead...
The condescending tone is because you believe you are talking to some child or something?
People have differing opinions, and what you believe as the "objective truth" is not some kind of gospel.
As a matter of fact, the very issue of current science having much less impact nowadays has been stated before on HN, with very valid explanations and analysis behind it.
One reason, for example, is that the more important stuff in most scientific fields are the lower hanging fruits, and early scientists got most of them. It's a case of diminishing returns.
Say whatever you want, but any current discovery is not of the caliber of Maxwell's equations, the discovery of DNA or evolution, Einstein's theory of relatively, et al.
It's marginal, incremental work, not evolutionary. And people "can't even keep up with it anymore" just because it's so vast and concerns minutiae, not because it's so groundbreaking.
I understand you very well. I also agree with you. But at this point in human history, this is just a lost debate. Better minds have fought this but lost!
Does being able to land on other celestial bodies and examine them up close not count as world-changing for you? Or do you think we could pretty much just do space exploration without computers?
Why, I am going to go so far as to talk down everybody who still does #{Y}, partly because I'm somewhat burnt out on it, and partly because my comparative experience makes me feel like it's easy compared to #{X}."
Where:-
* X, Y are very broad fields in which there is a whole range of tasks which span from the very simple to the insanely difficult,
* X, Y both revolutionised the world at different points in human history, X before Y.