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The Computer Revolution Has yet to Happen

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Re: The Computer Revolution Has yet to Happen

#41

Post by simonh »

greggman wrote: post #19
MCRed wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't be silly- Apple gives Xcode away for free, it is not bloated nor complex, nor particularly proprietary (who do you think made LLVM?) and you don't need to seek anyone's approval to upload your software to github or to run it on your own device. You can write Arm assembly on your laptop and run it on your iPhone even easier than you can on an rPi. You are really wasting time hating on Apple and spinning them (i…

XCode is not free. It costs 1 Mac. Given the price difference between the cheapest mac and the cheapest alternatives the cost of XCode something > $0 Posted from a mac

But that argument simply books down to "more expensive computers cost more". True a Linux computer might cost $500 and got $0 more you can program on it. A Mac might cost $800 and for $0 more you can program on it. The marginal cost to develop is the same. But I could easily spec up a Linux workstation costing thousands of dollars. Macs being expensive doesn't make Linux computers more expensive, it doesn't raise he costs for anybody else. So who exactly is being harmed here? I just don't really see what useful point is being made.

Re: The Computer Revolution Has yet to Happen

#42

Post by mercer »

danenania wrote: post #35
IIAOPSW wrote: post #29

I'm going to say something a bit controversial here. Most people are not creative. Its true. There isn't some horde of people who want to program but don't know it yet because they own a tablet instead of a computer. There isn't some horde of musicians that will never know it because their music comes from an mp3 instead of their own instrument. There isn't some horde of artists who will never know it because their i…

I have to strongly disagree. Humans are innately creative--just watch any child play if you doubt this. What many people lack is not creativity, but the confidence and skills to creatively express themselves. The majority of people do not have that spark they were born with nurtured, they have it squashed.

Childhood is my go-to argument in favor of 'everyone is creative'. I've not talked to a single person who wasn't highly creative as a child, and just realizing that makes me sad sometimes.

Re: The Computer Revolution Has yet to Happen

#43

Post by consz »

mercer wrote: post #42
danenania wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to strongly disagree. Humans are innately creative--just watch any child play if you doubt this. What many people lack is not creativity, but the confidence and skills to creatively express themselves. The majority of people do not have that spark they were born with nurtured, they have it squashed.

Childhood is my go-to argument in favor of 'everyone is creative'. I've not talked to a single person who wasn't highly creative as a child, and just realizing that makes me sad sometimes.

I've never been convinced by that argument. Looking back on my memories as a child, I wouldn't call myself creative -- I think that's something that I've developed as I've grown older, not something I was born with. Certainly, to a degree, children are curious, but that seems largely out of necessity (to learn e.g. language so you can express anything, not necessarily something creative).

Re: The Computer Revolution Has yet to Happen

#44

Post by datapat »

bobby_9x wrote: post #2

more than a minority of specialists? All of the software, apps, and services out there should tell you that it's more than this. I've seen multiple articles talking about people as young as 10 years old creating apps. This wasn't possible in the 80s and 90s. I'm still not sure why adblock was thrown in there. It has only made it more difficult for indy sites and thw average person to make money and is helping to crea…

>I've seen multiple articles talking about people as young as 10 years old creating apps. This wasn't possible in the 80s and 90s.

In 1980s UK kids were writing games that sold in their hundreds of thousands.

Maybe not 10 year olds, but 16 year olds like Christian Urquhart, Matthew Smith, Eugene Evans are well known names I can remember off the top of my head. There were other, less known, even younger kids than that writing popular games, and even more younger kids learning to program.

Re: The Computer Revolution Has yet to Happen

#45

Post by PakG1 »

sam_goody wrote: post #37
IIAOPSW wrote: post #29

I'm going to say something a bit controversial here. Most people are not creative. Its true. There isn't some horde of people who want to program but don't know it yet because they own a tablet instead of a computer. There isn't some horde of musicians that will never know it because their music comes from an mp3 instead of their own instrument. There isn't some horde of artists who will never know it because their i…

I disagree. As soon as it became as easy to create video as it was to draw, people created video content, not just consumed it. When sharing (youtube) was easy, the levels of creation have grown unbounded. The amount of media in all forms that is being created today is astounding. That's digital drawing If coding was as easy as writing we would find at least as much growth there. I know dozens of people who have idea…

Unfortunately, unless there is data to examine, this is only a platitude. When I survey the landscape, I'll tend to agree with the parent. Yes, there's been an explosion of content. But there's also been an explosion of consumers. Parent probably pulled the ratio out of thin air, but I'd say his point stands. The explosion of consumers is enough to handle the explosion of producers (and even the so-called prosumers). Honestly, you can count the number of YouTube stars out there with probably five digits, maybe even four. Compare that with annual YouTube views and passive accounts.

Re: The Computer Revolution Has yet to Happen

#46

Post by sparkie »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #29

I'm going to say something a bit controversial here. Most people are not creative. Its true. There isn't some horde of people who want to program but don't know it yet because they own a tablet instead of a computer. There isn't some horde of musicians that will never know it because their music comes from an mp3 instead of their own instrument. There isn't some horde of artists who will never know it because their i…

Most adults are consumers, but children are curious. You're looking at the wrong group if you think any kind of revolution will happen among the current generations.

When people argue that not everyone needs to learn to program, I contrast it to the idea that not everyone needs to learn to read. If you imagine the demand for competent readers before the printing press, it would be a similar situation to the demand for programming skill now. The ability for us all to read and share information is what has led to rapid progress. Imagine doing science without publishing text, but instead, all of our scientific ideas needed to be expressed in words and gestures, via conferences. Such thing just can't scale to the level it needs to be to have any progress. You simply can't do science without the ability to read and write.

It's becoming clear now that you can't do science without the ability to program too. Computers are a far more powerful medium for sharing ideas than text. When we use only text, to find anything of relevance in a big body of it, the author needs to write an "index" and map page numbers to alphabetically sorted words. He needs to manually update that index when the text is revised. (Fortunately, most papers are written with software which does this automatically now, but papers without hyperlinked contents/indexes are still abundant). In schools, children are taught the basic skills they need to do this, but little more which could accelerate their ability to share ideas.

We need to start thinking of programming ability as a core basic skill, among language, math, science and humanities. Most of it can be taught via math, language and science, and it would give children, who are naturally creative, a skill which they can use for absolutely anything. The idea that you learn to program to get a job as a programmer is a complete nonsense argument, it's like suggesting everyone learns to write so they can become authors.

Re: The Computer Revolution Has yet to Happen

#47

Post by random_upvoter »

sparkie wrote: post #46
IIAOPSW wrote: post #29

I'm going to say something a bit controversial here. Most people are not creative. Its true. There isn't some horde of people who want to program but don't know it yet because they own a tablet instead of a computer. There isn't some horde of musicians that will never know it because their music comes from an mp3 instead of their own instrument. There isn't some horde of artists who will never know it because their i…

Most adults are consumers, but children are curious. You're looking at the wrong group if you think any kind of revolution will happen among the current generations. When people argue that not everyone needs to learn to program, I contrast it to the idea that not everyone needs to learn to read. If you imagine the demand for competent readers before the printing press, it would be a similar situation to the demand fo…

Most young people don't want to become good at programming in the same way that most young people have no desire to become good at mathematics. They just don't want to shove their minds into that straightjacket of strict logical thought. It's naturally abhorrent to them.

Re: The Computer Revolution Has yet to Happen

#48

Post by based2 »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #29

I'm going to say something a bit controversial here. Most people are not creative. Its true. There isn't some horde of people who want to program but don't know it yet because they own a tablet instead of a computer. There isn't some horde of musicians that will never know it because their music comes from an mp3 instead of their own instrument. There isn't some horde of artists who will never know it because their i…

All, we need is harmonized interfaces for users customization like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResEdit (Let users change the ressources: images, sounds, texts - for translations, improvements).

Re: The Computer Revolution Has yet to Happen

#49

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

interpol_p wrote: post #26
ised wrote: post #5

To the author: I could not agree more. In the long term history of computing, I would hope this stage we are in now is not the height of the "revolution". In my humble opinion, to which I am entitled, current Apple hardware is still well-designed like the Apple hardware of the past, but none of it resembles a "bicycyle for the mind". These phones and tablets are "computers" but are programmable only by permission; th…

You can code on iOS devices. You can code in many different programming languages on IDEs available directly on the device. The code can be executed, and so programming is not inhibited. What you are referring to is deployment. You want to be able to deploy or distribute your programs freely through the official channels. And because that is locked down, you consider it "programmable by permission." I would argue tha…

The tablet point is a red herring. 8-bit micros were hardly portable. So discussions about whether or not you can code on iOS or OS X are tangential.

The real issue is how easily you can code. 8-bit micros hit the sweet spot. No system available today comes close.

You powered up the machine, and the first thing you saw was a BASIC line editor. There was nothing else to distract you. It was instant-on with no setup.

You had to write code to use the machine at all. You even had to write code - albeit one line - to load a game from a tape.

For the gifted, BASIC led naturally to machine code and to graphics made by writing bytes into memory.

No modern environment has anything like the same simplicity, directness, or sense of natural progression.

Xcode, gcc, anything with a build system (never mind a package manager) are insanely complicated in comparison. They're so complicated professionals have to write books explaining them to other professionals.

Even Python - possibly the best candidate for a successor to BASIC - has a quirky IDE and two and a half different popular versions, and a lot of other complications that a BASIC cursor doesn't.

JavaScript? You really have to learn CSS and HTML and jQuery and $(infinitely long list of frameworks goes here) and - oh look, is that the time?

There is a huge difference between encouraging programming by making access to it friction-free and trivially easy, with a learning space that's comprehensibly small but not dumbed-down and toy-like, and making programming possible for users who don't mind hurdling a lot of obstacles.

That first category is completely empty today. It shouldn't be, but it is.

Re: The Computer Revolution Has yet to Happen

#50

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

random_upvoter wrote: post #47
sparkie wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most adults are consumers, but children are curious. You're looking at the wrong group if you think any kind of revolution will happen among the current generations. When people argue that not everyone needs to learn to program, I contrast it to the idea that not everyone needs to learn to read. If you imagine the demand for competent readers before the printing press, it would be a similar situation to the demand fo…

Most young people don't want to become good at programming in the same way that most young people have no desire to become good at mathematics. They just don't want to shove their minds into that straightjacket of strict logical thought. It's naturally abhorrent to them.

Programming is a specialised trade like carpentry or metal working or ship building.

Of course you can build things with it. That's what specialised trades are for.

That doesn't mean everyone needs to learn how to be a carpenter or a brick layer or a mechanic or an architect. Most people just aren't interested, and even if they are, they don't have the mindset for it - never mind the time.

There may eventually be a way to get AI to the stage where people can "program" by telling an AI what they want, and leaving it to the AI to work out the details.

But that's a long way off. (Amazon's Echo is probably the closest thing for the moment.)

For now, the idea that most of the population is itching to play with build systems and scripting languages, or that their lives and/or brains would be improved by same, is pure fantasy.

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