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How to bring back the creative atmosphere of old school computing?, Is it possible? I feel that the abundance of choice and tools is what is having a negative
by hugozap 11y ago
How to bring back the creative atmosphere of old school computing?, Is it possible?
I feel that the abundance of choice and tools is what is having a negative impact on creativity. Somehow the non-ending stream of new tools/techniques/languages/frameworks is limiting our ability to create. It should be the other way but it's not. It seems like right now we are chasing the (non existent) perfect toolchain, and people are jumping from one tech stack to another without really producing valuable things.
The big problem is the short attention span that is caused by abundance of choice. When people jump to a new technology it will be fun because of the novelty, but the possibility of mastery is lost because everytime one has to ditch a lot of the knowledge that was starting to accumulate. This is specially bad in Web development, but it affects most of the computing areas.
We don't feel confortable embracing limitations and sadly that's a key ingredient of creativity. We prefer to spend long hours researching another tools. How can we "simulate" the lack of options that old school computing had? Is it possible anymore?
- danellis 11y agoI've only skimmed the article (it's in my Pocket for later), but I think the author gives the answer: embedded programming. You can make your environment as constrained as you want then.
- Kristine1975 11y agoOr demo programming. Program for the C64 (http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=66646 http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=66646), use max 1K for the executable (http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=66619 http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=66619) et.al.
- veddox 11y agoI'm not a professional programmer, but I have the very strong impression that the one area of programming that is most saturated with frameworks etc. is web programming. So if you want to be more of a generalist, choose another platform where the suction of individual technologies is weaker. I write desktop programs (as a hobby), and often switch between Python, Common Lisp, Java, sometimes C/C++, depending on what I need.
- pjc50 11y agoI think this is why people like the Arduino/Raspberry Pi ecosystems. There's always a contingent of people saying "you should have used a microcontroller dev kit instead" in the comments on any Arduino project, but then you'd have to choose which microcontroller. Arduino restricts needless complexity and enables people to get on with their project. Another subtle issue is that 'platform' == community. Sometimes this is an advantage, sometimes it isn't, and evaluating the community that you'll be joining by picking a tool is even harder than evaluating the tool. Web programming is just a shifting dunescape of reinvented wheels.