5 ms·

kids who get these in schools will never get to tinker. this whole trend is a tragedy

hdhzy 9y ago
I agree. Most consumer electronics (phone and tablets) are non developer friendly - you cannot develop anything on them. I find this quote by Russell Kirchner to be really good: > They’re trying to get everyone to use iPads and when people use iPads they end up just using technology to consume things instead of making things From https://impossiblehq.com/an-unexpected-ass-kicking/ https://impossiblehq.com/an-unexpected-ass-kicking/ There is also interesting observation made by Cal Newport in his book Deep Work [1] that teaching kids how to use iPads is counterintuitive as they - consumer products - are designed to be super easy to use and one should rather learn how to master hard things (e.g. programming). [1]: http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/ http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/
- rbanffy 9y ago
  Contrast that with an Apple II or a Commodore 64. You turn it on and you are inside a REPL in less than a second.
  - ryukafalz 9y ago
    As someone who didn't grow up with systems like that, I really wish I had. I was never really introduced to programming until high school, but I feel like I would've loved it at a younger age. GUIs are nice in many ways, but in general they seem to encourage consumption much more than they do creation. I feel like there has to be some way to build a GUI with the same kind of expressiveness as those early PCs, but I don't know how.
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      I recall seeing some big name in the computing world calling GUIs point-and-drool interfaces. And i can't help wonder if we ended up in this situation because the DOS CLI sucked, and the Mac didn't have a CLI at all. Thus anyone exposed to home computing back in the day things CLI is something nasty and borderline useless, and this mentality has transfered over to desktop _nix, where the CLI is quite the potent interface. Thus we have big name DE projects trying to insulate the users from the CLI, and coming up with ever more elaborate schemes of daemons and protocols to do what a few quick commands in a virtual terminal could solve. Yet time and again we see that the power-users and similar reject these elaborate GUIs and their plumbing for simple tiling WMs on top of an X11 session started from a CLI login to run a pile of virtual terminals (and the odd web browser).
      - ams6110 9y ago
        The DOS CLI didn't really suck any worse than the CLI of contemporary machines such as Apple ][ or Commodore or TRS-80.
  - styfle 9y ago
    Today, that's the browser. Hit F12 and you are inside a REPL (the console). Hit "View Source" and you can learn how a website works. The fact that developer tools ship with most browsers is really cool and encourages learning in my opinion.
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      May have been the case back when sites were static HTML. Tells you jack all how a modern site do things, as so much is hidden away at the server end.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  > you cannot develop anything on them. Yes you can, iTunes has quite a few development environments to play with. Swift Playgrounds and Pythonista are much more powerful than what I could do on my Timex 2068.
drdaeman 9y ago
I'm not sure. It's artificially restricted to be barely usable. If kids aren't apathetic about the device but actually willing to use it, it's hard to imagine a chance they would cope with the limitations (they seem way too severe, compared with the usual locking) and won't research how to exploit it to get around them and get the device's capabilities to the fullest.
- piaste 9y ago
  Also, piracy and kids go together like bacon and eggs.
taneq 9y ago
You can also get an Arduino or Raspberry Pi at a far more accessible price these days. It's not that kids are losing access to 'tinkerable' devices, it's just that not all of the many computing devices we use these days are freely reprogrammable.
- misingnoglic 9y ago
  The question is - will parents buy their kids these things, and will they actively use them? I think the much more frequent case is that kids playing computer games stumble upon this command line thing and are really curious what's going on.

I agree. Most consumer electronics (phone and tablets) are non developer friendly - you cannot develop anything on them. I find this quote by Russell Kirchner to be really good: > They’re trying to get everyone to use iPads and when people use iPads they end up just using technology to consume things instead of making things From https://impossiblehq.com/an-unexpected-ass-kicking/ https://impossiblehq.com/an-unexpected-ass-kicking/ There is also interesting observation made by Cal Newport in his book Deep Work [1] that teaching kids how to use iPads is counterintuitive as they - consumer products - are designed to be super easy to use and one should rather learn how to master hard things (e.g. programming). [1]: http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/ http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/

rbanffy 9y ago
Contrast that with an Apple II or a Commodore 64. You turn it on and you are inside a REPL in less than a second.
- ryukafalz 9y ago
  As someone who didn't grow up with systems like that, I really wish I had. I was never really introduced to programming until high school, but I feel like I would've loved it at a younger age. GUIs are nice in many ways, but in general they seem to encourage consumption much more than they do creation. I feel like there has to be some way to build a GUI with the same kind of expressiveness as those early PCs, but I don't know how.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    I recall seeing some big name in the computing world calling GUIs point-and-drool interfaces. And i can't help wonder if we ended up in this situation because the DOS CLI sucked, and the Mac didn't have a CLI at all. Thus anyone exposed to home computing back in the day things CLI is something nasty and borderline useless, and this mentality has transfered over to desktop _nix, where the CLI is quite the potent interface. Thus we have big name DE projects trying to insulate the users from the CLI, and coming up with ever more elaborate schemes of daemons and protocols to do what a few quick commands in a virtual terminal could solve. Yet time and again we see that the power-users and similar reject these elaborate GUIs and their plumbing for simple tiling WMs on top of an X11 session started from a CLI login to run a pile of virtual terminals (and the odd web browser).
    - ams6110 9y ago
      The DOS CLI didn't really suck any worse than the CLI of contemporary machines such as Apple ][ or Commodore or TRS-80.
- styfle 9y ago
  Today, that's the browser. Hit F12 and you are inside a REPL (the console). Hit "View Source" and you can learn how a website works. The fact that developer tools ship with most browsers is really cool and encourages learning in my opinion.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    May have been the case back when sites were static HTML. Tells you jack all how a modern site do things, as so much is hidden away at the server end.
pjmlp 9y ago
> you cannot develop anything on them. Yes you can, iTunes has quite a few development environments to play with. Swift Playgrounds and Pythonista are much more powerful than what I could do on my Timex 2068.

drdaeman 9y ago

I'm not sure. It's artificially restricted to be barely usable. If kids aren't apathetic about the device but actually willing to use it, it's hard to imagine a chance they would cope with the limitations (they seem way too severe, compared with the usual locking) and won't research how to exploit it to get around them and get the device's capabilities to the fullest.

piaste 9y ago
Also, piracy and kids go together like bacon and eggs.

taneq 9y ago

You can also get an Arduino or Raspberry Pi at a far more accessible price these days. It's not that kids are losing access to 'tinkerable' devices, it's just that not all of the many computing devices we use these days are freely reprogrammable.

misingnoglic 9y ago
The question is - will parents buy their kids these things, and will they actively use them? I think the much more frequent case is that kids playing computer games stumble upon this command line thing and are really curious what's going on.