A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software

Hmm, I'm confused. Those are all good ideas, but they all seem to be tinkerable?

Extrapolating it seems like what you're suggesting is making spaces where people can tinker socially rather than making tinkerability ubiquitous and trusting nerds like us to figure it out for themselves? Thus opening up the space to people we might not traditionally imagine as becoming software engineers?

I really like that assessment. Frankly I hadn’t thought that far so thanks for the extrapolation!

My Dearest TI-85 Calculator Games, (I shall name a few by names)

In lines of code and pixels fair, Within your realm, I find solace rare. A love that's forged in binary strings, A tapestry of malleable digital things.

Oh, how you captivate my heart, With your C-programming art. Your 8001 pixels dance upon my screen, Creating worlds, both vivid & serene.

Through endless loops and if-else's rhyme, We tinker in space, one byte at a time. Together, we unravel mysteries profound, In a realm where love, math & logic are bound.

Oh, Tetris, with your falling blocks of delight, You bring joy that illuminates the night. With each line cleared, my heartbeat soars, Our Soviet connection strengthens forevermore.

And Snake, dear Snake, slithering through the maze, A dance of patterns, a captivating craze. As I guide you, pixel by pixel, with care, Our bond grows deeper, beyond compare.

And let us not forget the classic Pong, A symphony of paddles, back and forth, strong. In this simple game, our tinkering takes flight, A testament to the power of endless night.

Oh, TI-85 Calculator Games, you're my muse, With you, my heart forever chooses. In lines of C, our love shall persist, Forever entwined in digital bliss.

To the best code goes the trophy, Yours truly, BarefootJoey & my AI homie

I 100% agree with the spirit of the article!

As an X-Gen, I remember as a kid the first computer I ever saw was a ZX-80!

You could do 'stuff' with those early computers, and Basic was great and all, but the early days of the Web really opened up exploration for me.

As a solo developer it suddenly provided opportunities to work commercially without having to have a computer science background and be a very serious C++ developer.

These days I see my kids exploring programming through Minecraft Java Edition. They also create and make 3D printed toys and objects in software I could never have dreamed of. They also create and edit their own YouTube movies, again things I never dreamed of being able to do.

So whilst early tech opened up possibilities to explore creativity, the options were limited in many ways.

Now the entire world of creative exploration no longer has gatekeepers.

The explosion of the App Store genuinely opened up opportunities through tools like xCode and globally distribution that individuals never had before.

Similarly, you can be a movie maker, photographer, App Developer, 3D artist, and producer of 3D Printed Widgets, and you don't need to ask anyone's permission.

It's not a perfect world, but it's still good for creators. Just that maybe it doesn't all seem as exotic as it once did in the 80s and 90s!

Edit: One thing missing today is the easy ability to play with commercial software without a license. Back in the day you just needed the file and a serial number.

Many schools provide licenses to Adobe software and more, so that's good.

And I suppose lots of software has a free Cloud version, or a limited trial. So its not all bad these days.

But I can recall preparing for interviews by finding a copy of some software and then playing with it on my own computer. That's riskier these days as you may end up turning your computer into a Crypto Mining device LOL

I'm currently playing with Pharo Smalltalk and everything is very accessible. I wonder why Smalltalk Environments did not catch on as operating systems, let alone just as languages, where everything can be tinkered with and modified on the fly.

Apple sounds like the kind of company that would successfully build a smalltalk device, yet they go the opposite way of locking down their devices hard.