A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software

In the realm specifically of computers, I think kiddos today who do have the inclination to tinker in the ways we remember fondly doing so are going to have a lot harder time of it. I personally have spent time around Zoomers who were raised on iPads, and they love and are interested in learning more about technology, but at the same time are coming at it with what I perceive at least to be a far lower skill average than what I had at their age because all they know are iPads and smartphones, which are more and more locked down and untinkerable and who's muscle memory and general knowledge pool just isn't transferable to "real" computers, if you will. For example: a younger person once asked me where the file browser was on a Windows PC. I had to explain to them that's Explorer, but it didn't connect with them because it was configured on this machine to open their share drive on a university system which is just a drive letter, not a set of curated folders like "Documents," "Downloads," "Gallery," etc. And to be completely clear here: I am not calling this kid stupid, they weren't. They were untrained and ignorant, akin to someone who wants to learn to drive a sports car only ever being given access to the PlaySkool red and yellow pedal car.

Now that being said, there are still plenty of ways kiddos can tinker with software and electronics. 3D printers immediately come to mind. You (usually) can't just bang your sausage fingers on a capacitive screen and get good quality prints from go. There's calibration, for many there's assembly, for still others there's less computery-stuff but more things like chemistry if you're going the resin route, not to mention materials safety and of course, inevitable troubleshooting. It's not quite the same but IMO, it still promotes analytical, problem-solving, learning-to-research-and-self-teach type thinking which is critical to developing engineer brains.

That being said, if you do want your kid to go into software, if it isn't already obvious to you, take away their stupid phone and give them a proper computer. And if you don't want them necessarily going into software then just take away their stupid phone, at least sometimes, so the social media companies can't completely rot their brains out before they're even out of school.

> given recent advancements in UI

Also I have to push back on this specific point: I don't know of a single thing, except MAYBE iOS, that is consistently good with regard to UI. Windows is downright atrocious at this point, MacOS is fine (apart from Finder which is awful but it's always been awful), Android is a complete mess, every AAA game sports an interface that's even worse than the last, embedded systems are almost universally badly coded/organized and full to the brim with chinglish (is that term offensive?), web apps are slow as fuck with everything designed "mobile first" by which they mean they took out all the text and made everything stupid icons inside drawers so you end up sitting there translating some designer's idea of how hieroglyphs could work...