51–60 of 624 posts
1. They fail (e.g. Smalltalk).
2. They succeed (e.g. the web). When they succeed, professional programmers overwhelm them and make damn sure only very very professional programmers can ever use them again.
>Why can't I write code inside my browser? um... because you didn't press ctrl-shift-I? But frankly, if you can't manage to install ruby and think $PATH is somehow complicated or scary, I don't want you writing code. So maybe it's for the best that you haven't discovered the developer tools built into every browser.
I take the "wtf is user/local/bin in $path?" to be a question from a non-tech person that is interested in learning to code. I can't be sure though since the author stated he has failed to install Node js. Should Chrome have Node JS loaded into it during install? I don't do web-dev so my answer is no. Should there be browsers made for those learning web-dev that come with these? By all means, sure. Go nuts. This also…
Or editors/IDE inside the browser:
https://webide.se/ https://codeanywhere.com/ https://aws.amazon.com/cloud9/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mentioned Glitch and Replit in the article - they're great and I love them but there's still something missing about relying on these platforms imho. I think cementing a default coding environment right into the browser would make it a lot more accessible - and actually be much closer to real coding where you're manipulating files and running code. Plus: glitch/replit are quite slow to do any real coding inside of vs…
If you open the dev tools in your browser there's a full sandbox environment right there, not to mention the load of other sites available. I don't see why specifically Node should be installed.
Saving and loading .js files uses a very non-standard flow. The editor is OK but I think basic operations like "find across files" are missing. It's very "canned" and not customizable.
In other words, it feels more like a debugging environment than a programming environment, which I think is basically what they were going for.
The whole sentiment of this article just comes off a little whiny to me. Nowadays there is so much more information available for learning how to code and set up your dev environment. There are literally coding books for kids at book stores. And StackOverflow! When I was younger, one had to search high and low on the net trying to find help using shitty dial-up service. Then, you'd end up in some IRC channel asking f…
I'm happy to be that old guy who learned programming with magazine articles(and a pirated copy of turbo Pascal. You really appreciated that hypertext help.)
That said, they did carry BBS magazines which led me eventually into the nascent WWW over the 14.4K modem I saved all my pocket money to buy.
Then I finally managed to access the resources to learn. God bless mailing lists.
I am fascinated by the continued prevalence of excel in many industries. It feels as if some modern scripting language should be able to replace some aspects of the spreadsheet and work much better.
A former co-worker used to work in London for a bank, his job was to maintain the linked Excel spreadsheets that were business critical - and only took six hours to produce a result.
He found moving to the Java ecosystem rather relaxing and uncomplicated in comparison.
I'm curious if the author has heard of sites like: * https://repl.it/ * https://jsfiddle.net/ I didn't see anything like that mentioned in the article, but I think that you can easily write code inside your browser today. Also, web browsers are already extremely heavy and complicated. That complexity is convenient for end users, but it also has costs, like making it very difficult and expensive to create a new compet…
He even goes on to quote himself (sigh) as a proof of what he proposes.
Look, maybe someone just explained it badly to you, and you should look it up for yourself. However, if the command line looks scary to you... wait until you read bad documentation :)
My point is: yes, programming is awesome. But just like it's hard to become a good musician if you shy away from sheet music, programming is hard if you shy away from command line and a little web searching to know what $PATH is.
If that is your mindset, then maybe it's just not for you. There's still plenty of awesome things you can do in IT without ever touching code, though. Machine learning is accessible from nice UIs now. I used that, it's great.
As pointed out by others, there's also plenty of websites where you can either try things, or build complete projects. AWS, for one, has a fully browser-based editor for Lambda. Look it up, it might be the solution for you.
I feel like the author is confused between server-side and client-side development, and proceeds to say that programming is hard. He even goes on to quote himself (sigh) as a proof of what he proposes. Look, maybe someone just explained it badly to you, and you should look it up for yourself. However, if the command line looks scary to you... wait until you read bad documentation :) My point is: yes, programming is a…