if you studied computer science before 1960 you did maths and electronic engineering. If you studied computer science after 1970 you probably learned a subset speciality. All fields change and all work looks different 10 years later.
Web apps are sufficiently turing-complete that the arrogance of "thats not tech" is just wrong.
Carmack wouldn't write asm for a device now, in all cases. He might do Verilog for an FPGA but he might be doing something else.
I think the author's point is that modern toolchains make spinning up a basic web app more like following a recipe, and as such is free of many (novel) technical challenges. As technology goes, it's still complex, but so is building a microwave oven and yet we don't call GE's white goods department a tech company. It's a challenge that's already been tackled and is well understood.
If your web app is doing something that's never been done before, which requires the application of scientific principles and so on, like... translating baby babbles into English, then it's still technology, but that would not be because it's a web app.
There is a great spanish saying (I got this from historical fiction) "let no new thing arise"
Vonnegut wrote a course for eng. lit creative writing on the 7 canonical plotlines of all stories. ever. I thought "goodness whats the point in writing now" but it hasn't stopped people making good entertaining fiction
All code is variations over abstraction, synthesis, loops, decision forks, recursion (tail or not) and all data structures iterate back over lists and arrays, over trees and DAGs.
At some future date, assuming the GPT-3 adherents are right, nobody will "write code" because we will describe systems design goals to an intermediary which then writes the code.
Where is the tech then?
I do think there is tech and non-tech. But it gets very like pornography and the Meese commission: I know it when I see it.
What I find hard, is how many people writing for the REPL or compiled languages, dismiss what is done in CSS or in JS outside of webasm. or PHP. The arrogance is the exclusionary behaviour.
Carmack is very smart. Had he been born 40 years earlier he might well have been the one to work out how to optimise track to head delay on a drum memory, or hacked delay lines, or even have done something amazing in LSI before VLSI. But then some non-carmack doing bitblt optimisations to make games happen would have been wondering "am I a real tech or not"
(btw I think GPT-3 Adherents are smoking strong stuff. I don't expect anyone to write informally stated natural language of intent and have proscriptive, defined code come out the other side, but you know this is a strawman argument too)
I graduated in 82. Because I did not do the Mudge VLSI Course I was held in somewhat contempt by my peers who did. I did Pascal. I was held somewhat in contempt by the Fortran NAG library maintenance squad. We who ran the boxes, and wrote controllers for the plotter were a bit contemptuous of the ones coding for the BBC micro and I was completely distainful of the guy coding .BAT files. None of this is "good" behaviour because we were all doing "tech" But the guys in the engineering labs doing Hypersonic wind tunnels were sometimes a bit elitist about us in s/w ... Over in the school for the logical foundations in computer science they were already writing abstract meta-code which was as far removed from an instruction set as its possible to be: theories of computation, proof systems, you name it.
Physicists and Engineers have been arguing for centuries about the difference between their disciplines.
> But people don't talk about ancient inventions as "technology", outside of a historical context. When we call something technology, we generally mean something invented recently
This is rediculous, the whole articles schtick is based on an inline redefining of the word its about.
Well I guess the sky isn't blue anymore because the word blue doesn't mean blue anymore, it means red.
I dunno about you all, but when I talk about technology, I am referring to the accepted definition meaning. Not "recent tech", although a lot of contexts this can be assumed.
But nobody out there is assuming you mean recent tech when you're talking about ancient Egyptian technology.
Words mean things, so does context, stop trying to redefine the meaning of words all the time, it's tiring, and we usually have a word for what you want to convey already.
From it's own definitions this article is patently false.
Quote: "applying scientific knowledge for practical purposes"
You're doing that when you try to reduce time to display from 1 second to 1000ms, when trying to chose algorithms that better match your users real usage of the site, to just plain moving a button a few pixels so people see it better. It doesn't have to be the new shiny to make an actual impact.
I 100% agree with you, and to dismiss web apps in this way is to devalue making thinking easier for people. However, I'm also amused by the Freudian slip of 1 second to 1000 ms, which would of course be "tech" instead of tech.
WeWork is a "tech" company in the sense that the actual business is a thin tech veneer around an established business model (like Regus Group). A huge number of SaaS services are effectively a thin design layer around a database, a technology that has been established decades ago. I think that's the real thrust of the post.
The article explicitly gives that definition to show that everything is tech by the dictionary - from fire and pottery to vertical-landing rockets and quantum computers. It then points out that the common-use definition of tech has more to do with the (fuzzy) novelty of the scientific discovery than with the existence of it.
Is this very different from people who tune the design of springs in car door handles so they have a nice click when you open them? That's good engineering, but is it what you'd call tech? Or does it need to be done on a web app to be tech?
Absolutely that's tech. Metallurgy, force maps, 3d models, computer controlled machining, etc is in fact HIGH technology. To previous generations that's just plain magic, even if the user doesn't spend more than 1/10th of second thinking about it.
Aside: When I moved to SF for my first job in 2014 I thought I'd be working in "software". I was a bit surprised to learn that what I'm actually working in is "tech" (and that I'm something called a "techie" as well). It seemed to me that nobody really talked like this in college - you wouldn't say you majored in "tech", my fellow ACM members weren't "techies". Since we are almost always talking about software, the label seems a bit odd. I suspect it's the influence of finance that lumps all these industries together, but the work and environment is very different in HW vs SW.
In this thread: heated discussions that boil down to different definitions of the word "tech".
Since "tech" is mostly a marketing term, this seems fairly pointless. For suitable definitions, a real-estate company is hot "tech". For other reasonable definitions anything that is is mass production is not "tech".
1) Share something I found profoundly encouraging for newcomers trying to make a dent with their technical skills
2) Explore how conflating two different (but overlapping) things we use the same word for makes it easy to mistakenly feel like it's "too late" to make a dent with technical skills.
Given just how many people got upset after interpreting it along entirely different lines, this piece is clearly going to take some more revision.
I think what you’re really trying to describe is disruptive innovation. The way new technological development creates new market / business opportunities.
It’s not just about technology itself, but the relationship and timing between the technology’s capabilities and potential customers.
And you’re right, that technical skills will be invaluable to these businesses because in many cases, these technologies still have technical challenges to overcome before it’ll meet the customer needs, i.e. technical risk.
I think it’s great that you expressed your ideas, shipped it and then iterated on the clarity because many engineers with entrepreneurial ambitions will find your insights useful.
I thought this was going to be another blog about how Javascript isn't a real programming language and web apps are cancer.
It's not.
It's actually a very nice article about the BAFTA acceptance speech that John Carmack gave.
> I do hear sometimes from programmers who are kind of sad that they don't have the opportunity to write game engines from scratch like I did and have it matter or make an impact...
> here's where some perspective really helps - I can remember when I was a teenager, I thought I had missed the Golden Age of 8-bit Apple 2 gaming, that I was never going to be Richard Garriott...time went by, and I got to make my own marks in things after that. And, in that time, I also see so many opportunities that have come by.
> The 90s PC wave was great - I was happy to be there, and I'm glad I took a swing and knocked one out of the park with that. But since then, we've seen mobile games, and web games, and free-to-play games, the Steam revolution...and now virtual reality. And all of these are amazing!
> So, yeah, the opportunities that I had aren't there for people today - but there are new and better ones. And personally, I'm more excited about these than anything that's come before. So, thank you very much for this honor, but I'm just getting started.
If you're building a website for a non-tech business (e.g. an online store) then that's pretty much a commodified industry at this point, no more "tech" than e.g. building a building or a bridge. Not saying that there isn't important, valuable work, and even certain kinds of innovation involved, but it's a different kind of thing from work that's inherently about applying genuinely novel scientific advances.
In our own spheres of tech, we have a nostalgia for the childhood that we missed. A childhood where everything was still new and magical. Where fairies might plausibly be lurking around the corner. Things like realizing that phone lines were using sounds as control signals let you play in this field more easily. I imagine living in the era where they were just realizing that you could define a common interface for different instruction sets that allowed portability and I wonder how many of those ideas I would have come up with.
That's what I attribute "golden age" talk to. I guess the author's point is that there are other field of technology that are currently young. I agree, but it's not exactly the same magic: Computer Tech is uniquely accessible, and our freedom to explore and play in other fields is limited by the current economic situation.
However, even if I'd been born earlier, the golden age wouldn't have been as accessible to me geographically (I'd be in <small-mountain-town>, India).
Also, my current goal is to get myself to a place where I can play in mature fields and explore younger ones.
Readit News
Web apps are sufficiently turing-complete that the arrogance of "thats not tech" is just wrong.
Carmack wouldn't write asm for a device now, in all cases. He might do Verilog for an FPGA but he might be doing something else.
If your web app is doing something that's never been done before, which requires the application of scientific principles and so on, like... translating baby babbles into English, then it's still technology, but that would not be because it's a web app.
Vonnegut wrote a course for eng. lit creative writing on the 7 canonical plotlines of all stories. ever. I thought "goodness whats the point in writing now" but it hasn't stopped people making good entertaining fiction
All code is variations over abstraction, synthesis, loops, decision forks, recursion (tail or not) and all data structures iterate back over lists and arrays, over trees and DAGs.
"never been done before" is pretty rare anywhere.
An app doesn’t have to be cutting edge in order to clear some arbitrary bar of what constitutes “tech”.
That's a difficult position to engage with constructively.
Where is the tech then?
I do think there is tech and non-tech. But it gets very like pornography and the Meese commission: I know it when I see it.
What I find hard, is how many people writing for the REPL or compiled languages, dismiss what is done in CSS or in JS outside of webasm. or PHP. The arrogance is the exclusionary behaviour.
Carmack is very smart. Had he been born 40 years earlier he might well have been the one to work out how to optimise track to head delay on a drum memory, or hacked delay lines, or even have done something amazing in LSI before VLSI. But then some non-carmack doing bitblt optimisations to make games happen would have been wondering "am I a real tech or not"
(btw I think GPT-3 Adherents are smoking strong stuff. I don't expect anyone to write informally stated natural language of intent and have proscriptive, defined code come out the other side, but you know this is a strawman argument too)
I graduated in 82. Because I did not do the Mudge VLSI Course I was held in somewhat contempt by my peers who did. I did Pascal. I was held somewhat in contempt by the Fortran NAG library maintenance squad. We who ran the boxes, and wrote controllers for the plotter were a bit contemptuous of the ones coding for the BBC micro and I was completely distainful of the guy coding .BAT files. None of this is "good" behaviour because we were all doing "tech" But the guys in the engineering labs doing Hypersonic wind tunnels were sometimes a bit elitist about us in s/w ... Over in the school for the logical foundations in computer science they were already writing abstract meta-code which was as far removed from an instruction set as its possible to be: theories of computation, proof systems, you name it.
Physicists and Engineers have been arguing for centuries about the difference between their disciplines.
This is rediculous, the whole articles schtick is based on an inline redefining of the word its about.
Well I guess the sky isn't blue anymore because the word blue doesn't mean blue anymore, it means red.
I dunno about you all, but when I talk about technology, I am referring to the accepted definition meaning. Not "recent tech", although a lot of contexts this can be assumed.
But nobody out there is assuming you mean recent tech when you're talking about ancient Egyptian technology.
Words mean things, so does context, stop trying to redefine the meaning of words all the time, it's tiring, and we usually have a word for what you want to convey already.
Since "tech" is mostly a marketing term, this seems fairly pointless. For suitable definitions, a real-estate company is hot "tech". For other reasonable definitions anything that is is mass production is not "tech".
1) Share something I found profoundly encouraging for newcomers trying to make a dent with their technical skills
2) Explore how conflating two different (but overlapping) things we use the same word for makes it easy to mistakenly feel like it's "too late" to make a dent with technical skills.
Given just how many people got upset after interpreting it along entirely different lines, this piece is clearly going to take some more revision.
It’s not just about technology itself, but the relationship and timing between the technology’s capabilities and potential customers.
And you’re right, that technical skills will be invaluable to these businesses because in many cases, these technologies still have technical challenges to overcome before it’ll meet the customer needs, i.e. technical risk.
I think it’s great that you expressed your ideas, shipped it and then iterated on the clarity because many engineers with entrepreneurial ambitions will find your insights useful.
It's not.
It's actually a very nice article about the BAFTA acceptance speech that John Carmack gave.
> I do hear sometimes from programmers who are kind of sad that they don't have the opportunity to write game engines from scratch like I did and have it matter or make an impact...
> here's where some perspective really helps - I can remember when I was a teenager, I thought I had missed the Golden Age of 8-bit Apple 2 gaming, that I was never going to be Richard Garriott...time went by, and I got to make my own marks in things after that. And, in that time, I also see so many opportunities that have come by.
> The 90s PC wave was great - I was happy to be there, and I'm glad I took a swing and knocked one out of the park with that. But since then, we've seen mobile games, and web games, and free-to-play games, the Steam revolution...and now virtual reality. And all of these are amazing!
> So, yeah, the opportunities that I had aren't there for people today - but there are new and better ones. And personally, I'm more excited about these than anything that's come before. So, thank you very much for this honor, but I'm just getting started.
> -John Carmack (BAFTA acceptance speech)
And the gatekeeping is really unbecoming.
That's what I attribute "golden age" talk to. I guess the author's point is that there are other field of technology that are currently young. I agree, but it's not exactly the same magic: Computer Tech is uniquely accessible, and our freedom to explore and play in other fields is limited by the current economic situation.
However, even if I'd been born earlier, the golden age wouldn't have been as accessible to me geographically (I'd be in <small-mountain-town>, India).
Also, my current goal is to get myself to a place where I can play in mature fields and explore younger ones.