5 ms·

While that's true, the orthogonal skills can sometimes make the real work easier. Knowing even a small amount of VBA could save you hours in Excel. Knowing a sm

While that's true, the orthogonal skills can sometimes make the real work easier. Knowing even a small amount of VBA could save you hours in Excel. Knowing a small amount of Python could let you rename every mp3 file on your hard drive in 5 minutes. When you remove access to the low levels of the computer, you remove a lot of the ability to solve one-off problems. There are people who put panels inside panels on WinForms just to get a border color other than black, because they aren't aware they can override Panel.OnPaint. Having only high-level access may make easy things easier, but it can also make hard things much harder. There was a great submission here recently called "Programming as a super power" (http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2010/01/20/programming-as-a-super-power.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2010/01/20/programmin...), where the author said that "there are more programs that should be written than professional programmers can ever write." This could be abstracted to "there are more things that should be done at a low level than superusers can ever do." So if the iPad doesn't let you do things at a low level, there will be negative consequences.

ugh 17y ago
Programming is a super power – but if you want to be able to use it, you need years of training. Not in the strict sense. But you need to be motivated, you need to invest time, you have to fight with the (foreign and abstract – non-intuitive) basic concepts and many people won’t have the time to do that. Becoming a lawyer is quite hard enough, thank you. Just as it’s hard to be a doctor and a lawyer at the same time, so is it hard to be a programmer and a lawyer at the same time. Even if you only know a bit about medicine. Even if you only know a bit about programming. That’s not to say you can’t do it, but it’s not easy and many won’t do it. It’s frustrating: I (not being a programmer) spent a few hundread hours of my life understanding programming and programming. Heck, I can explain bisection search or bubble sort to you. I can write cute little (clumsy) programs that do stuff (useless stuff, that is). But that’s not enough to save me hours in Excel. The most frustrating part about this is that I know what kind of automation is theoretically possible but I can’t actually do it. That knowledge is so often so unbearable. But I don’t have the time to invest a few days worth of work into understanding how to go from theoretical to practical, not for this one specific problem. But that’s just how it is. You can’t be an expert at everything.
- jacobolus 17y ago
  > many people won’t have the time to do that. The basic concepts and main ideas aren't that hard: certainly no harder than understanding high-school level mathematics. Ever see what Alan Kay was able to teach children to do in the 70s, with an intuitive enough development environment and programming language. Being able to write straightforward little algorithms to solve data-munging tasks is more and more a matter of basic literacy, especially for people like lawyers, or scientists, who need to sort and sift through masses of data, find the interesting patterns, and explain it to the world.
  - ugh 17y ago
    Maybe, maybe not. I can certainly write straightforward little algorithms, but I always get lost when I want to hook them up to anything useful (writing algorithms is still hard, though, especially if you don’t do it constantly but only from time to time). There is no easy way to do this at the moment. Not if you want to ignore details, just write something and have it work. The best I can do at the moment is guess if something is possible to do, guess the amount of work and tell someone (who’s an expert) what to do. You are probably right about scientists, though. It’s a pain to see social scientists working with the mess that is called SPSS when r is so cool. I don’t know why that is but when toying around with r I feel for the first time that I am able to actually do something useful with what I know about programming.
    - jacobolus 17y ago
      Oh come on. A couple years ago I was able to teach a college friend, a political science student, who had never done a lick of programming, and who had last taken a math course in high school, enough Python to scrape down data from a bunch of websites and do some simple analysis on it, in about 2 hours. Granted, he's a smart guy, and obviously he should really spend a few weeks or months learning the ins and outs if he wants to get especially sophisticated, but seriously, these things are essential for anyone with any kind of research or curation job ... and frankly for anyone: so much of our society runs on searching and sorting through masses of data that it’s important to understand just to know what’s going on, even for those uninterested in answering their own questions.
jodrellblank 17y ago
"While that's true, the orthogonal skills can sometimes make the real work easier. Knowing even a small amount of VBA could save you hours in Excel" """It is a very important lesson in rationality, that at any time, the Environment may suddenly ask you almost any question, which requires you to draw on 7 different fields of knowledge. If you missed studying a single one of them, you may suffer arbitrarily large penalties up to and including capital punishment. You can die for an answer you gave in 10 seconds, without realizing that a field of knowledge existed of which you were ignorant. This is why there is a virtue of scholarship.""" - Good Ol' EY - http://lesswrong.com/lw/qx/timeless_identity/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/qx/timeless_identity/ This is the answer to the endless questions from my schooldays - "when are we ever going to use this?" and "will it be on the test?". If you know something you can recognise if you are in a situation where it is useful and benefit from knowing it (or choose not to use it). If you don't, you cannot recognise when you are in a situation it would be useful and will suffer arbitrary consequences from the lack of it, and won't even realise that there was a missed opportunity.
- barrkel 17y ago
  The corollary is that it ought then be more important to teach how to recognize what specialisms different situations require than to teach the specialisms themselves. That way, more people benefit from the powers of delegation and specialization.
akeefer 17y ago
Let's take it as a given that the iPad and like devices won't kill normal computers any time soon, if ever, so those of us who know we want to tinker will have a place to do it. The question, then, is if one is designing a mass-market computing device, is the ability to tinker with it going to produce enough good in the world to offset all the misery it causes to other people? For every person that saves ten hours using VBA to program their spreadsheet, how many other people lose hours because they get a virus or install incompatible programs or corrupt some obscure system file? In other words: you're 100% correct that there will be negative consequences, but don't forget that there will be positive consequences as well. It's a judgment call as to which side you think weighs more heavily and where the overall balance will be. Yes, you lose something important and valuable when you lose the ability to tinker. Yes, the world would be better if you could have that AND not have people frustrated and crippled by their technology. But no one has figured out how to do both yet. I think it's fair to say that you have to make the choice, and you can't have it both ways. And given that choice, my personal accounting tells me that we gain a lot more by removing the frustration than we lose by removing the power. While we lose something, I think we gain a lot more, and I don't see any way to gain it without giving something up.
- flogic 17y ago
  I think there are more solutions than just open or closed. I just recently tried my hand at Blackberry development. It runs 2 type of code. Signed and unsigned. Accessing certain API's requires signed code.
- joe_the_user 17y ago
  The question, then, is if one is designing a mass-market computing device, is the ability to tinker with it going to produce enough good in the world to offset all the misery it causes to other people? Excellent question! I would answer yes. I would also add that I think Geeks often under-estimate how much simple tinkering non-geeks sometimes do. The number of competent windows and macintosh users is constantly increasing. Even for those outside geek circles, this basic competence can be a jumping-off point for further tinkering.

ugh 17y ago

Programming is a super power – but if you want to be able to use it, you need years of training. Not in the strict sense. But you need to be motivated, you need to invest time, you have to fight with the (foreign and abstract – non-intuitive) basic concepts and many people won’t have the time to do that. Becoming a lawyer is quite hard enough, thank you. Just as it’s hard to be a doctor and a lawyer at the same time, so is it hard to be a programmer and a lawyer at the same time. Even if you only know a bit about medicine. Even if you only know a bit about programming. That’s not to say you can’t do it, but it’s not easy and many won’t do it. It’s frustrating: I (not being a programmer) spent a few hundread hours of my life understanding programming and programming. Heck, I can explain bisection search or bubble sort to you. I can write cute little (clumsy) programs that do stuff (useless stuff, that is). But that’s not enough to save me hours in Excel. The most frustrating part about this is that I know what kind of automation is theoretically possible but I can’t actually do it. That knowledge is so often so unbearable. But I don’t have the time to invest a few days worth of work into understanding how to go from theoretical to practical, not for this one specific problem. But that’s just how it is. You can’t be an expert at everything.

jacobolus 17y ago
> many people won’t have the time to do that. The basic concepts and main ideas aren't that hard: certainly no harder than understanding high-school level mathematics. Ever see what Alan Kay was able to teach children to do in the 70s, with an intuitive enough development environment and programming language. Being able to write straightforward little algorithms to solve data-munging tasks is more and more a matter of basic literacy, especially for people like lawyers, or scientists, who need to sort and sift through masses of data, find the interesting patterns, and explain it to the world.
- ugh 17y ago
  Maybe, maybe not. I can certainly write straightforward little algorithms, but I always get lost when I want to hook them up to anything useful (writing algorithms is still hard, though, especially if you don’t do it constantly but only from time to time). There is no easy way to do this at the moment. Not if you want to ignore details, just write something and have it work. The best I can do at the moment is guess if something is possible to do, guess the amount of work and tell someone (who’s an expert) what to do. You are probably right about scientists, though. It’s a pain to see social scientists working with the mess that is called SPSS when r is so cool. I don’t know why that is but when toying around with r I feel for the first time that I am able to actually do something useful with what I know about programming.
  - jacobolus 17y ago
    Oh come on. A couple years ago I was able to teach a college friend, a political science student, who had never done a lick of programming, and who had last taken a math course in high school, enough Python to scrape down data from a bunch of websites and do some simple analysis on it, in about 2 hours. Granted, he's a smart guy, and obviously he should really spend a few weeks or months learning the ins and outs if he wants to get especially sophisticated, but seriously, these things are essential for anyone with any kind of research or curation job ... and frankly for anyone: so much of our society runs on searching and sorting through masses of data that it’s important to understand just to know what’s going on, even for those uninterested in answering their own questions.

jodrellblank 17y ago

"While that's true, the orthogonal skills can sometimes make the real work easier. Knowing even a small amount of VBA could save you hours in Excel" """It is a very important lesson in rationality, that at any time, the Environment may suddenly ask you almost any question, which requires you to draw on 7 different fields of knowledge. If you missed studying a single one of them, you may suffer arbitrarily large penalties up to and including capital punishment. You can die for an answer you gave in 10 seconds, without realizing that a field of knowledge existed of which you were ignorant. This is why there is a virtue of scholarship.""" - Good Ol' EY - http://lesswrong.com/lw/qx/timeless_identity/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/qx/timeless_identity/ This is the answer to the endless questions from my schooldays - "when are we ever going to use this?" and "will it be on the test?". If you know something you can recognise if you are in a situation where it is useful and benefit from knowing it (or choose not to use it). If you don't, you cannot recognise when you are in a situation it would be useful and will suffer arbitrary consequences from the lack of it, and won't even realise that there was a missed opportunity.

barrkel 17y ago
The corollary is that it ought then be more important to teach how to recognize what specialisms different situations require than to teach the specialisms themselves. That way, more people benefit from the powers of delegation and specialization.

akeefer 17y ago

Let's take it as a given that the iPad and like devices won't kill normal computers any time soon, if ever, so those of us who know we want to tinker will have a place to do it. The question, then, is if one is designing a mass-market computing device, is the ability to tinker with it going to produce enough good in the world to offset all the misery it causes to other people? For every person that saves ten hours using VBA to program their spreadsheet, how many other people lose hours because they get a virus or install incompatible programs or corrupt some obscure system file? In other words: you're 100% correct that there will be negative consequences, but don't forget that there will be positive consequences as well. It's a judgment call as to which side you think weighs more heavily and where the overall balance will be. Yes, you lose something important and valuable when you lose the ability to tinker. Yes, the world would be better if you could have that AND not have people frustrated and crippled by their technology. But no one has figured out how to do both yet. I think it's fair to say that you have to make the choice, and you can't have it both ways. And given that choice, my personal accounting tells me that we gain a lot more by removing the frustration than we lose by removing the power. While we lose something, I think we gain a lot more, and I don't see any way to gain it without giving something up.

flogic 17y ago
I think there are more solutions than just open or closed. I just recently tried my hand at Blackberry development. It runs 2 type of code. Signed and unsigned. Accessing certain API's requires signed code.
joe_the_user 17y ago
The question, then, is if one is designing a mass-market computing device, is the ability to tinker with it going to produce enough good in the world to offset all the misery it causes to other people? Excellent question! I would answer yes. I would also add that I think Geeks often under-estimate how much simple tinkering non-geeks sometimes do. The number of competent windows and macintosh users is constantly increasing. Even for those outside geek circles, this basic competence can be a jumping-off point for further tinkering.