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Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?

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Re: Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?

#171

Post by kfir »

tdeck wrote: post #157
amelius wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The answer is obvious - most people don’t want to do this. There are still millions of people who want to do this. The question is more: why do phone companies actively discourage it?

By "phone companies" you really mean Apple. You can do this easily in Android, there are even full-blown IDEs for various languages in the Play store. Google created App Inventor as an entry-level way of doing this. None of this seems to be particularly popular but it's an option.

Are you familiar with swift playground? https://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/

Re: Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?

#172

Post by gilmore606 »

safety1st wrote: post #95
pdntspa wrote: post #72

Because smartphones are designed to keep you stupid. Computer literacy means you are able to poke holes in their shitty abstractions. The industry does not want you programming or creating, the industry wants you to be consuming. Preferably with your credit card.

Before people dismiss this as a conspiracy theory, it's 100% correct. It's not even a radical view. * Authoritarian governments don't give their subjects a good civic education because an educated population tends to start demanding more freedoms. * Industrial barons never wanted their factory workers to learn about unions because once they did, sure enough they wanted to unionize. * To desire and defend your digital…

> Authoritarian governments don't give their subjects a good civic education

This seems to have been untrue in the USSR, and it seems currently untrue in China, the first two big authoritarian governments that came to my mind. Also "because" is doing the heavy lifting in your sentence, I do wonder how you arrived at that causality.

Re: Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?

#173

Post by Kinrany »

gilmore606 wrote: post #172
safety1st wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before people dismiss this as a conspiracy theory, it's 100% correct. It's not even a radical view. * Authoritarian governments don't give their subjects a good civic education because an educated population tends to start demanding more freedoms. * Industrial barons never wanted their factory workers to learn about unions because once they did, sure enough they wanted to unionize. * To desire and defend your digital…

> Authoritarian governments don't give their subjects a good civic education This seems to have been untrue in the USSR, and it seems currently untrue in China, the first two big authoritarian governments that came to my mind. Also "because" is doing the heavy lifting in your sentence, I do wonder how you arrived at that causality.

The civic education in USSR was clearly not good if you look at the current state of Russia.

Re: Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?

#174

Post by rufus_foreman »

pier25 wrote: post #76

People in this thread are complaining about smartphones not being designed for tinkering as a bad thing. As a dev I agree with the sentiment but otoh I'm very happy I don't have to tinker with my car or my fridge.

I really miss that world, tinkering with my car.

Re: Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?

#175

Post by [deleted] »

nindalf wrote: post #77
nigamanth wrote: post #75

Everyone nowadays is lazier than the average man in the 80s. In the 80s, you probably had to buy music in a store rather than use Spotify or Apple Music or had to look up information in the library instead of google it. The industry wants you to get everything you want through one click, nowadays though, it's not even a click, you just need to talk about it and Alexa and Google Home will pick up on it.

This is just a low effort “kids these days are X, unlike when I was a kid” or “back in my day, men were men”. Your specific claim isn’t worth responding to, but maybe you’d enjoy a short history of “kids these days are spoiled” - https://twitter.com/paulisci/status/1600628195854020608?s=20

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?

#176

Post by StanislavPetrov »

gilmore606 wrote: post #172
safety1st wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before people dismiss this as a conspiracy theory, it's 100% correct. It's not even a radical view. * Authoritarian governments don't give their subjects a good civic education because an educated population tends to start demanding more freedoms. * Industrial barons never wanted their factory workers to learn about unions because once they did, sure enough they wanted to unionize. * To desire and defend your digital…

> Authoritarian governments don't give their subjects a good civic education This seems to have been untrue in the USSR, and it seems currently untrue in China, the first two big authoritarian governments that came to my mind. Also "because" is doing the heavy lifting in your sentence, I do wonder how you arrived at that causality.

The term "civic education" means different things to different people. In North Korea everyone is blanketed with "civic education" on a daily basis, but it isn't the sort of civics that leads to democracy.

Re: Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?

#177

Post by joeman1000 »

Of course, as the current top comment mentions: because most people don’t want to make programs. Computing in the 80s was limited to nerds, business users and a school kids. All of these groups have some incentive or drive to write programs, above that of the average person from the population.

Anyway, this is not an excuse for the state of operating systems today, which dissuade people towards programming. Yes, I even mean Unix-like operating systems. Why? Simply because the mental gap between ‘programs as we use them’ and ‘programs as we write them’ is so large on a modern OS. Consumers are stuck essentially playing in the sandpit and don’t really learn anything about computing while they use the computer. Unless of course they have some weird drive that helps them weather the pain of going against the tide and actually learning what’s going on in their computer.

There is very little you can learn from an application (such as Firefox, telegram etc.) because they offer zero introspection and are completely alien things compared to how they are conjured.

Think of the Apple II, there was very little gap between using the ‘OS’, making a program and using a program. They were nearly the same thing, or felt the same.

How would you interact with the computer? Enter some text. How did you make a program? Enter some text and save it. How did you run and interact with the program? …

Alan Kay talks about this a lot. If you imagine Smalltalk (now Squeak) as an OS, the gap between programming and using programs is tiny, so you learn by consuming and thus the leap to proficiency isn’t so big.

Another great counter-example is emacs. It offers introspection info everything and lets you modify a lot of its behaviour in a uniform way. I thing this is why people like it so much. You learn it as you use it and you’re encouraged to modify it. It’s a far cry from how most software is made today.

Re: Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?

#178

Post by friend_and_foe »

Because you cannot be productive in that way on a smartphone alone.

The smartphone is descended from simple communication devices, and adapted into a richer communication environment and a content consumption device.

You need a computer to do anything hacky with a smartphone, so you're more likely to get into the details on a computer in the first place. Smartphones are mostly useful for consumption of media, an activity that isn't really condusive to tinkering and modifying.

Re: Ask HN: Why don't smartphones encourage programming like early 80s computers?

#179

Post by MandieD »

rhaway84773 wrote: post #156
wongarsu wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The industry does not want you [...] creating Twitter, Instagram and TikTok would like to differ. User created content is still a major thing, even if we stopped calling it web 2.0. Most of that just happens in other domains than programming (though Roblox exists, so programming does happen too).

I know the term creator has its genesis from the word create. But no, most creators are not doing anything creative. One way to see this is to notice there are movies made a 100 years ago that people will still watch today. There are books written half a millennium ago people read today. There are pieces of music written 100s of years ago people listen to today. There’s almost nothing created on Instagram or TikTok t…

To be fair, there is quite a bit of survivorship bias at work - how many stories, poems and plays have been written over the past 500 years that never made it into print and disappeared forever within a few years of being written? Until the 19th century, putting things into print was very labor-intensive (and was still quite labor-intensive until the late 19th), so anything that has survived was compelling to at least the person who paid to have it printed.

Now that putting creative works out into the world is cheap and easy, yes, the vast majority of the dross will be forgotten almost immediately after it’s uploaded, but a few gems will remain the be passed around for decades or longer.

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