Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used operating system

you can include just one component of the entire Play Service library (e.g. cloud messaging) in an Android Studio project with a line like this in build.gradle:

  compile 'com.google.android.gms:play-services-gcm:10.0.1'

but, i get the impression that's not quite what you mean when you say "install the whole blob."

i guess you're talking about the Google Play Services library, which is updated independently of my app. or something like that.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

not quite sure. trying to clarify this for my own understanding.

> The industry has been chasing the dream of making programming accessible for everyone for as long as computers have existed. This was the reasoning behind COBOL, BASIC, and Scratch.

Yes, and it's working. All of those projects helped. A child will learn far more in their first year of programming today than I learned in my first year of BASIC. I think that trend is accelerating and we are very close to the hockey stick part of the accessibility graph. There are a LOT of people who have at least dabbled in programming today.

> If it's Turing complete then someone can and certain would write spaghetti code.

Sure. And yes, some poor schmo will have to deal with it.

But most of the code won't be spaghetti code. Most of the code changes will just be string edits. Marketing has a vested interest in not breaking their pipelines.

I honestly think a little instruction goes a long way here. It's not that people won't be learning coding best practices, it's that you won't need a year of training up front just to get started. I'm not talking about eliminating the learning curve, I'm talking about making it shallow and linear.

> There's no reason why they couldn't just drag and drop such logic

Visual logic programming has been a mixed bag. It does work well for some very constrained kinds of programs, like shader pipelines and audio programming. But generally research into visual programming has not gone well.

Text has one very important benefit over visual programming: it's linear. That's nice because much of code execution is linear. It's actually a tree, but it's definitely not Cartesian.

Drag and drop is also not very intuitive for most users. It's an invisible affordance. It requires dexterity. And it's also not very constrained... You can drag anything into anything.

Most programming will be text. I don't think it will be pure ASCII but it will be linear text.

> Programmers aren't purposely trying to make their environments difficult

Of course not. They are trying to make it just easy enough for a full time professional to figure out and no more.

> High level business code that you sort of dismiss is the hard part. Knowing to gather requirements and codify them is the job a programmer

I think you're forgetting about some programmers. You know the kind... They just want something complicated to do. Like "rewrite the entire system using a custom memory store instead of SQL" and then they disappear into the wilderness for 4 weeks and come out with it finished.

Some requirements mean a lot of code to change. Some requirements require almost none.

What will happen is the "mostly talking, with fairly obvious code changes" part of the job will get absorbed into other roles. Marketing, support, finance, they'll just do that coding themselves. At least they'll do the patch and submit it for review.

And the other stuff... Stuff that's more about code than business needs, that will still be the domain of the professional programmer.

Current programmers will have a choice. Do I want to stay in mostly code all day and solve thorny problems? Or do I want to drop the "programmer" title, still do some coding, and move to marketing/support/finance alongside other "non-progeammers" who are doing a decent amount of high level programming.

> There is no such thing as "obvious code changes".

What about "there's a letter missing in this heading"?

> Even basic SQL is beyond the skills of most them

I would put SQL in the category of "advanced programming". It's declarative programming, which is not easy for beginners, and you can literally do any operation at all from any place in the code. There's zero separation of concerns.

> You massively under-estimate the skill and experience involved in even the most basic programming tasks.

What's so hard about changing a letter in a string on Github? Anyone who can send a text message could do that. To me, that's the "most basic programming task".

What's impossible about:

    Hi Fred,

    Thanks for noticing that typo! You can fix it yourself... The code is here:

https://gist.github.com/erikpukinskis/198a752e2fd286f2179b16...

    Just click "Fork" and then "Edit" and make the change. The system will send
    me a notification and if nothing is broken I'll merge it, and it should be
    live within the hour!

    Best,
    Erik

> ultimately none of them can or want to program.

OK, so that's a cultural barrier. If you want to really lure people in, it will require a little more than an email like the one I suggested. I think to get people to bite, you need a few things:

1) Web-based editing, with instant preview (no downloading anything, no commands to type)

2) No repos, just editing single files

3) Very high ratio of domain-specific language to implementation language. Most programmers don't bother separating out their domain language (customer, sale, analysis, etc) from their implementation language (page, element, server, etc) You can't have a sidebar with node_modules, src, view, etc, it distracts people.

All this really requires is writing an extra layer of domain code that wraps your implementation code. It's not necessary if your code is only ever read by professionals so most programmers don't bother doing it. It's extra work after all.

4) Use only functions, function calls, and literals. No loops, no classes, etc. That stuff can go in the implementation layer, but you can't expose it. This also means no SQL, no CSS, etc. One language, three language constructs.

5) Separation of shared code from sensitive code and data. If you can do something like:

    import "users"
    users.delete_all()

... you're screwed. People will never feel safe making changes in that environment. You need real separation of concerns where the code being edited is mechanically separated from everything but the few functions you want to expose to people. Think of each source file as a custom sandbox for just one non-programmer employee.

Get all five of those, and you have yourself a changed game. Building all of those things is a bit of work, but there's nothing fundamentally mysterious about how to do it. It's just work that most companies don't do because you can just wall off your code within your professional programming team instead.

Ah I'm a little salty because although you get security updates for 3 years you only get feature updates for 18 months. Combine that with the fact the Google so poorly plan their product releases that supply is constrained for the first 6 months of the product lifecycle. So in practice someone who manages to buy a device when they're generally available has at best a year to get updates for their shiny new $500-$900 device. It was egregious when a new Nexus device was $500+, now it's outrageous.

The Pixel XL was released in October of 2017 which means updates stop one year away from today in April of 2019. Top of the line is $968 and you want top of the line for best memory performance. Why buy one of those phones and purchase sub par performance? It's a waste of money. So if I wanted one I'd pay $80/month for a device that's replaced in October of this year (Pixel 2 is supposedly an end-of-year release) and dropped from feature upgrades not too long after that.

Google need to fix their feature window by extending it to two years and fix their supply pipeline by ordering apple-like quantities of product. Otherwise they're not really competing with Apple.