4 ms·
Making a programming language harder to use, or making a build chain more difficult to get working, doesn't make software better. Raising the barrier to entry
by mplewis 11y ago
Making a programming language harder to use, or making a build chain more difficult to get working, doesn't make software better.
Raising the barrier to entry doesn't "raise the bar" when it comes to software quality. It just adds artificial difficulty.
The hard part about writing software shouldn't be Hello World. It should be building a user experience people enjoy. The less steps to get to that point, the better.
- perucoder 11y agoI'm not sure if it works that way in real life. Dreamweaver made it really simple to create websites but look at the quality of what was produced. Any good developer would not use this tool even though it did make things simpler
- nostrademons 11y agoThat's a quality/ubiquity tradeoff. Dreamweaver converted non-consumers into shitty programmers. It didn't actually reduce the quality of anyone's existing HTML, it just increased the quantity of HTML out there, and of course the marginal machine-generated HTML is going to be worse than that written by experts with 5 years of experience. Average software quality declines, but this is a Simpson's-paradox effect, not a decline in the output of any one person's software. Ditto PHP, Node.js, Rails, and any other technology aimed at opening up programming to a larger audience. This trend has a while to go: while there are vastly more programmers out there than when I started programming, there are still vastly more non-programmers than programmers, and I believe that ultimately mastery of machines will become as important as literacy.