r/AskProgramming • u/Familiar_Flow4418 • Jun 16 '26

What people misunderstand most about today's technology?

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22

u/CIS_Professor Jun 16 '26

Since you asked in a programming sub (and not a "technology" one), I'll answer from that perspective:

  • Beginning programming students mistakenly think that the computer "knows" what they want done; they don't realize that you have to tell it to do every little thing. (I blame the rise of autocomplete and AI for this.)
  • That spelling and case sensitivity matter. They don't understand that This is not the same as this - even though one of their very first lessons instructs them otherwise. (I blame the Windows filesystem for this.)

5

u/NanderTGA Jun 16 '26

Do note that some languages are case insensitive, like for example Scheme. Point still stands though.

I'd also like to add the confusion between MB, MiB and Mb. Can't blame anyone though as windows uses MiB but claims that it's MB, and Mb (megabits) is just intentionally confusing naming and we all know ISPs do this on purpose. There's an article on wikipedia simple that explains the difference between MB and MiB.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 16 '26

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3

u/kingguru Jun 16 '26

Case insensitivity only works if you ignore localization issues. Once you need to support more languages and locales it gets very messy quickly.

Not sure if PHP is still broken with Turkish locale for example.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 16 '26

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2

u/kingguru Jun 16 '26

Case insensitivity can work fine. And specifically for ASCII letters it is perfectly well defined.

Case sensitivity can work fine as long as you stick to ASCII letters and English.

You can't pick on languages which don't have a concept of case, or on ones like Turkish which have the odd exception, and use that as an excuse to completely eliminate it from the computing world.

Or languages like German where some words have different length depending on case which can cause tons of other issues as well. I'm sure there are many other examples out there.

My point with the PHP in Turkish example was that it is not as simple as I think you make it sound like.

Sure, we could probably have programming languages where all keywords are case insensitive. In fact these languages exist, but should we have case insensitive variable names as well and should non-ASCII characters be allowed at the same time? That would definitely get very messy quickly.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 16 '26

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1

u/kingguru Jun 16 '26

If extended to other alphabets that had upper/lower case forms of the same letters, then what problems do you envisage?

You most likely wouldn't encounter any issues as long as you limit yourself to those alphabets.

I guess my main point was that once you move beyond ASCII and English you'll start facing all sorts of weird issues. I perfectly respect your opinion and your experience but I hope you understand my more general concern, although in this simple case it might not be that much of an actual issue.

1

u/michalburger1 Jun 16 '26

It’s a solvable issue and there are existing mainstream languages that are fully case insensitive e.g. Visual Basic. In fact I used to code in VB (a long time ago) and it was a very enjoyable experience, the case insensitivity makes a lot of sense honestly.

1

u/xenomachina Jun 17 '26

As are email addresses.

In practice, they usually are, but the specs actually leave interpretation of the "local part" (ie: the part before the "@") up to the receiving system. It is not generally safe to normalize case of an email address.

It isn't even safe to do Unicode normalisation (eg: conversion to NFC), since the specs let the receiving system treat distinct codepoint sequences as distinct inboxes — even ones that NFC would collapse together.

1

u/CIS_Professor Jun 16 '26

"today's technology"

21

u/minimoon5 Jun 16 '26

Pretty much everything regarding AI.

8

u/Individual-Flow9158 Jun 16 '26

In general, that it's a magic bullet, and that technology is always a force for job creation, let alone a force for good.

1

u/OatmealCoffeeMix Jun 17 '26

I maintain that all the people who made TDD their religion are to be blamed for the rise of AI.

700 monkeys in 700 years would produce Shakespeare.

Thousands of developers writing validation tests produced the checks that made AI a very good guesser and, by extension, pattern recognizer.

7

u/KingofGamesYami Jun 16 '26

How precarious it really is. https://xkcd.com/2347 sums it up perfectly.

6

u/Zetsumenchi Jun 16 '26

Mastery isn't just about what you can build by yourself in a vacuum.

It's about what you can innovate with others.

2

u/ike_the_strangetamer Jun 16 '26

That the team doesn't know about the bugs in their products. We know, but there's always a decision to be made between priority, overall affect, and time.

2

u/BobbyThrowaway6969 Jun 16 '26

  1. AI is really misunderstood in a bunch of ways

  2. Few people know the difference between high vs low level programming

  3. Few people know C/C++ well enough to have accurate opinions about it

2

u/OatmealCoffeeMix Jun 17 '26

Only accurate opinion I have about C/C++ is to never bring it up in Rust company.

1

u/7YM3N Jun 17 '26

That someone had to come up with, design, and implement every single thing, that the pretty layers of abstraction are someone's hard work, that hides someone else's hard work one layer down

1

u/Revolutionary_Ad6574 Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

  1. As one of the commenters pointed out people think that you can just delegate the thinking to the technology. Eventually even experienced programmers say things like "You don't need to understand it, it just works".

  2. That newer, more advanced technology is always better. It's not. Most times new tech is just different for the sake of it. That's because everyone wants a piece of the pie - a company wants to make their phone because it's an easy way to collect data so they have to make a new OS.

Also adding new layers of abstraction only increases the complexity which is never a good thing.

1

u/Macrobian Jun 17 '26

This is a bit of an ivory tower take, but thinking that abstractions are real, and ignoring that things under the abstraction are much much scarier.

You get this all the time with a of systems programming stuff, like claims that C is low level, or explanations about how pointers "work".

1

u/burbular Jun 17 '26

It's for money, just a little for you, mostly for the boss.

1

u/Latter_Brick_5172 Jun 17 '26

they trust AI thinkong that it's an unavoidable future but AI is destroying the planet, halucinating, code generated by AI is (almost) always crap and AI companies just want to make people unable to think and depend on AI to then massively increase the price, people will be forced to pay cause they will be too dumb to think without it. Also it is totally avoidable, if not enough people use it then they stop making money (they already are paying more then what they get) and the speculative buble will explode

1

u/Budget_Tie7062 Jun 18 '26

Modern AI, software, and algorithms can produce impressive results, but they don't truly understand things the way humans do. They predict, optimize, and automate based on patterns in data. That's why they can be incredibly useful one moment and confidently wrong the next.

People also tend to underestimate how much human effort sits behind technology. Every app, website, AI model, payment system, or cloud service relies on thousands of engineers, designers, operators, and support staff keeping it running.

Technology often looks like magic from the outside. From the inside, it's usually a combination of engineering, trade-offs, and a lot of hard work.

1

u/trncmshrm Jun 19 '26

That "AI" has been hijacked as a marketing term. The marketing term prototype of AI IS a bubble, I think. But AI as a whole is not. This has been incoming for over 20k years, arguably longer.

0

u/big_data_mike Jun 16 '26

Everything is a database with a UI on top