While I generally enjoy a Cory Doctorow opinion I can't help but to think he is off on this one. The iPad is analogous to a newspaper, both used for consuming content and both gated from seeing how they work on the inside. The Apple IIgs' of today are Arduino's, FPGAs, and the like. Mostly or fully open source and customizable.
Is Apple destroying a generation of tech whizzes?
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Re: Is Apple destroying a generation of tech whizzes?
#22Actually, it might give students a real incentive to tinker: "hey, you might make thousands of dollars on the App Store". Parents? Spend $100 for a curious kid's birthday to get a dev kit, it would be a great investment. Especially if it takes away from time they'd spend doing passive things like watching TV.
Re: Is Apple destroying a generation of tech whizzes?
#23Here's my take. When I was a kid, yes I had the Apple II, I had HeathKit radio kits, etc. And yes we now have iPhone, iPad, etc. But folks those all have SDK's. And Linux exists now. Arduino. Mindstorms. Roomba. All kinds of electronic and computer kits for experimentation. Make magazine. Mainstream bookstores now actually have lots of geeky computer magazines and books on the shelves. And the Internet: tons of free software and documentation, all at your fingertips -- all of this quite unlike the 70's/early-80's.
So no, I don't think somehow the iPad is part of some new Dark Age. If anything, we live in a Golden Age for hackers. More so now than back then, taking into account what I cited above.
Re: Is Apple destroying a generation of tech whizzes?
#24Are "apps" so bad? In a perfect world, everything would work great on all standards-compliant browsers. But here I am, using Google Docs on Opera and it's destroying my homework.
Re: Is Apple destroying a generation of tech whizzes?
#25I've always believed the biggest single moment of destruction of future programmers is when Microsoft stopped shipping BASIC (plus the full source code of the games GORILLA.BAS and NIBBLES.BAS) with DOS/Windows.
I loved Gorillas. But Windows ships with .NET, including a C# and VB.Net compiler. I'd rather have hacked on that than BASIC, nostalgia value notwithstanding.
Now yes - as I much prefer Ruby, C++ and a wee bit of Haskell these days. But to learn? Absolutely not. The beauty of BASIC was that everything was simple enough that a 10 year old kid could comprehend it: type in instructions, and run them. No compilers, no CLR, no API calls. All of those things make the barrier to entry too high.
I started out writing things like:
10 PRINT "Jason"
20 GOTO 10
10 FOR I = 1 TO 10
20 PRINT "Jason"
30 NEXT
But if that first step is too high, many people will never be able to climb it.
Re: Is Apple destroying a generation of tech whizzes?
#26No - because they are expensive. It's like claiming that Mercedes is destroying the hot-rod industry because kids can't get the engine management codes. Macs were never for hackers now iApple isn't - so what?
A lot of hackers love their Macs.
Re: Is Apple destroying a generation of tech whizzes?
#27This blog post (thankfully the economist hasn't published it as an article) is just another excuse to mention the word "iPad".
Re: Is Apple destroying a generation of tech whizzes?
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I loved Gorillas. But Windows ships with .NET, including a C# and VB.Net compiler. I'd rather have hacked on that than BASIC, nostalgia value notwithstanding.
Now yes - as I much prefer Ruby, C++ and a wee bit of Haskell these days. But to learn? Absolutely not. The beauty of BASIC was that everything was simple enough that a 10 year old kid could comprehend it: type in instructions, and run them. No compilers, no CLR, no API calls. All of those things make the barrier to entry too high. I started out writing things like: 10 PRINT "Jason" 20 GOTO 10 The reason why that's s…
That's exactly how I learned to program.
Re: Is Apple destroying a generation of tech whizzes?
#29No - because they are expensive. It's like claiming that Mercedes is destroying the hot-rod industry because kids can't get the engine management codes. Macs were never for hackers now iApple isn't - so what?
Macs were never for hackers
Sure they are. Macs are full Unix workstations that can also run Office and Photoshop, with a much better UI than Linux. The meme that Apple's computers are deliberately unfriendly to hackers has never been true, until the iPhone and iPad.
Re: Is Apple destroying a generation of tech whizzes?
#30I think the single device which got most people into programming in my generation was the Nintendo Entertainment System, and I do not remember it as being a playground of hackability. It just showed six year olds that if you ate your carrots and studied math you would eventually be able to do magic.
In my opinion the Commodore/Amiga and later the PC computers created a lot more programmers than the Nintendo Entertainment System did. The North European game industry (DICE, Starbreeze, Remedy, etc.) was more or less based on the demoscene i.e. hacking for fun, not math education. Sure, the NES inspired a lot of people. But the real questions is: What if the NES would have been hackable?