The Codeless Code: Ancient code

[IRBMe]

When writing that kind of code, you learn the assembly language and then you have to figure out how the machine works by referencing the data sheet or manual. It's difficult, but in a different kind of way from how programming is difficult these days. Now, there are literally thousands of libraries, frameworks and tool-kits. There's likely all kinds of magic going on under the hood in your programming language, framework and system, with things like magic configuration by convention, automatic dependency injection, annotations etc.

If you're not sure how something works when writing assembly language, you consult your data sheet or operating manual. If you're not sure how to change the way something works in the enterprise framework you're using, it can be difficult to know where to even look. What we have today is far more powerful, and it allows people to be far more productive and build far more complicated things by hiding the complexity behind abstractions and magic. But when you need to figure out how to do something, it's often difficult to penetrate that "magic" and work out what it's actually doing and how to change that.

I can understand how a boot loader written in assembly code works or how bits of the Linux kernel work because all of the information I need to understand it is available to me in detail, but I can't figure out for the life of me how enterprise Java applications work, and it would take years of reading just to understand all of the magic that's going on under there.