{"id":7311,"date":"2017-01-25T18:54:29","date_gmt":"2017-01-25T23:54:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7311"},"modified":"2017-01-25T22:59:27","modified_gmt":"2017-01-26T03:59:27","slug":"tools-generate-culture-a-trivial-example","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7311","title":{"rendered":"Tools generate culture: a trivial example"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If I were the kind of person who grumbles about feeling ancient, I&#8217;d have been doing it today.<\/p>\n<p>I got reminded that younger hackers don&#8217;t know the bit structure of ASCII like their tongues know the back of their teeth.  Man, we <em>all<\/em> grokked that back when I was new at this.<\/p>\n<p>Nowadays not so much.  I&#8217;ve actually seen younger hackers be confused about, say, how to generate a NUL from the keyboard.  And I&#8217;m all, like, &#8220;How can you not know this?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m bothering to post because I think I&#8217;ve figured out why this changed.  The kids are OK, it&#8217;s conditions around them that have shifted.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I think it was the death of RS-232 hardware terminals in the early 1990s that did it.  <\/p>\n<p>Back before software terminal emulators ruled the world, there was just enough functional pressure to use all manner of odd nonprintable ASCII characters daily &#8211; and learn what control-foobar key combinations generated them &#8211; that newbie hackers tended to upload the ASCII code table into their heads pretty quickly.<\/p>\n<p>This doesn&#8217;t happen reliably any more. Yes, hackers still learn individual magic keystrokes in various interfaces like vim or Emacs, and ^C as interrupt we will probably always have with us.<\/p>\n<p>But, for example, who types ^L to clear a screen anymore?  Or ^W to delete a word? Or, even rarer, ^S and ^Q as pause-resume. OK, I&#8217;m sure some people do &#8211; but I was actually surprised when ^L and ^W just worked in the software terminal emulator I use under i3.  Because they don&#8217;t <em>everywhere<\/em>, and as a result I lost those finger habits &#8211; oh, about twenty years ago, I&#8217;d guess. And, of course, younger hackers probably never learned them.<\/p>\n<p>The kids are all right.  It&#8217;s the world that changed around them, and tools generate culture. Sometimes, when a tool goes away, a bit of cultural commonality  &#8211; like everyone knowing ASCII down to the bits &#8211; silently evaporates with it.<\/p>\n<p>I wonder if, a quarter century from now, one of today&#8217;s young hackers will find himself saying &#8220;What?  You don&#8217;t know HTML tags?&#8221;  And if I&#8217;m there, I&#8217;ll chuckle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If I were the kind of person who grumbles about feeling ancient, I&#8217;d have been doing it today. I got reminded that younger hackers don&#8217;t know the bit structure of ASCII like their tongues know the back of their teeth. Man, we all grokked that back when I was new at this. Nowadays not so&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7311\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Tools generate culture: a trivial example<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hacker-culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7311"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7321,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7311\/revisions\/7321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}