51–60 of 235 posts
Why aren't AAA games running on text based interactive fiction engines? Because for the target market, that's crap.
Most people do not want to learn programming. I know, it's a horrible thought, but it is what it is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To quote myself with emphasis added, "Something akin to hypercard could be made to work ." So something like hypercard but not hypercard and reworked to the strengths of a smartphones interface.
Alright, I agree. Not easy to come up with the akin though.
ex: In many respects there is vastly more effort involved in making them general purpose computing devices. Why harm profits catering to people who want that when the crushingly vast majority don't want it, when they can't be trusted to use it (directly or indirectly) without messing something up (harming profit via support costs), and when they aren't able to prevent bad actors from misusing it and harming them (again harming profits)?
ex: Why do game developers skip story? Because 90% of the market doesn't care about it. Why do movie studios crank out films with garbage stories/plot? Because 90% of the market doesn't care about it. As long as people and therefore companies believe that generating revenue is the only thing that matters, this results.
Cellphones are consumed by the vast majority of people as expensive toys and nothing else.
I'd argue that a mobile phone is not an adequate platform for coding. The touchscreen and keyboard layouts make it difficult to type needed symbols, distracting from the problem at hand. Coding requires deep thought, but phones are optimized for moving around rather than sitting in one place and thinking. As such, use cases like maps, calendars, communication and alarms get priority. The reason people buy a phone is…
As someone who has done a non-trivial amount of coding work directly on my phone, I'll say you just get good at being able to type the symbols you need (though I agree it isn't great; but like, that's what BASIC is for, and I certainly spent a ton of time coding BASIC on my old TI calculators ;P). I also frankly find my phone to be an extremely pleasant device to "sit in one place and think", and given how many games…
But just watching it causes severe physical pain in me. Everything is awkward, and painful slow. In the time you would have written a page of code on a desktop in an IDE you hardly manage to write a few lines of working code on a phone. Alone the fact that you can't use keyboard shortcuts efficiently is more than crippling! Not to mention the extremely tiny screen on a phone. On a desktop you have for serous work 2, or better 3 screens (or some big wide one), for a reason.
And regarding deep thinking: The best setting for that is imho not the desktop, nor the bed. Best for thinking is actually walking around, while not being distracted by anything else.
In the 80s and 90s. One could still have a very high level understanding of every single part of the computer. From Hardware to Software. The whole stack.
We now have a whole generation of programmers who dont understand a thing about Hardware. Not even enthusiast level. Nor do they understand anything beyond their domain within Software.
The bar is also a lot higher, when basic graphics and UI luxury and command line is still acceptable. You could quickly make a script to do something you want.
And then there is a whole generation of I would argue needless complexity added on top of complexity. Take Web development for example. CGI or PHP used to be Simple. It wasn't easy, but it was simple. I dont know where to begin to describe in today's web dev.
And nothing stopping you from pushing your app to Google Play so all your friends can download it onto their phones.
Probably the major reason why early 80's computers made basic so prominent is that there wasn't much else to do with them.