I've felt this way for several years -- we've went from engineering to something more like witch doctor.
The problem is, of course, that all abstractions are leaky, and we've piled abstraction after abstraction on top of the hardware. So it's not unusual to have four or five levels of stuff between you and the machine. Adding to that is the problem of multi-cores: it's not just one machine operating anymore. Each piece is deterministic, sure, but as all the pieces interoperate in real-time that determinism can be so hidden as to be effectively non-existent.
Languages are going to be able to help to some degree, but at the end of the day machines are just going to keep getting more and more complex and our understanding of them shallower and shallower.
It'll be interesting to see if there is a major hardware refactoring that takes place anytime soon. I imagine for AI to work we're going to need it.
The problem is, of course, that all abstractions are leaky, and we've piled abstraction after abstraction on top of the hardware. So it's not unusual to have four or five levels of stuff between you and the machine. Adding to that is the problem of multi-cores: it's not just one machine operating anymore. Each piece is deterministic, sure, but as all the pieces interoperate in real-time that determinism can be so hidden as to be effectively non-existent.
Languages are going to be able to help to some degree, but at the end of the day machines are just going to keep getting more and more complex and our understanding of them shallower and shallower.
It'll be interesting to see if there is a major hardware refactoring that takes place anytime soon. I imagine for AI to work we're going to need it.