alt Hacker NewsThis kinda makes me think about the transition from writing machine code by hand to using a compiler. Did people feel similar at the time that they didn't understand the machine code that the compiler was writing for them?
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Yes!
Each step in abstraction we've made had people who felt uncomfortable at the level of magic they were accepting. At one point in the 70s/80s, traditionalists were arguing that C itself was too high level. Then in the 90s and early 00s, that languages like Python and garbage collection were absurd: a "good" programmer doesn't need them and they give up too much control. Then as web development ramped up, people entered the "Javascript is slop" phase into "React is slop" phase.
Anytime the barrier to entry is reduced and some skill or profession becomes more focused on output than the ego of the professionals, you can bet a counter-culture of people will rise up to oppose it. It's a threat to their sense of "betterness" and/or the (perceived) value of their career.
> ... they didn't understand the machine code that the compiler was writing ...
This is a bold assumption and inconsistent with my knowledge of history. High level languages allowed better management of complexity and reduction of tedium. The common complaint was that compilers produced less efficient (slower and/or larger) code, not that the output was more complex. It was[1] normal to read the compiler's output, which was generally assembly or another intermediate representation. After all, a compiler is merely a tool for translation from one language to another. Additionally, early compilers often were not optimizing compilers; the code they generated was simpler than handwritten programs.
1: And still is, for some of us!