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Does anyone else have the feeling that there has been a move away from the kinds of tools that make it very easy for beginners to get started? I'm thinking of t

Does anyone else have the feeling that there has been a move away from the kinds of tools that make it very easy for beginners to get started? I'm thinking of things like Hypercard, Flash or VisualBasic classic (VisualBasic in the 1990s). Simple tools that made it fun for non-programmers to learn the basics of computer programming? Even simple HTML/CSS has lost importance, and writing simple Web sites is how I got started back in 1995. Look at what happened on the Web between 2005 and 2015, where we transitioned from using HTML/CSS to instead building systems with React/Relay or Angular or Vue. Especially since 2005, it’s unclear that we gained much — the old system gave us Google Maps and Gmail and a lot of great online software, none of which seems obviously worse than the kind of software being created today. And, contrariwise, the biggest missing piece in 2005, a good Open Source tool for animation to replace Flash, is still missing now. What do we do nowadays when we want to mix images, sound and video in an interactive interface? We can build these sites with complex Javascript, though we are still missing a good authoring tool to match what Flash used to have — in particular a tool that allows people with little skill to do a great deal. Using React/Relay/GraphQL requires a tremendous amount of skill. (There also used to be the argument, put forward by folks like Phillip Greenspun, that Flash did not belong on the Web, because the Web was fundamentally about text and images and HTML. I read Greenspun’s book in 1998, and I strongly agreed with him then and for many years following, but we have to admit that debate is now long dead, along with ideas such as semantic pages. The way people use Javascript now is in the spirit that Flash was once used.) http://www.smashcompany.com/business/business-productivity-has-been-undermined-by-the-hubris-and-power-grabbing-of-elite-computer-programmers http://www.smashcompany.com/business/business-productivity-h...

dkns 9y ago
I disagree. If you're in a developer bubble you may believe that everyone is using react or angular or vue but if you're beginner you're more likely to stumble upon on something like codecademy or freecodecamp. On freecodecamp they start by teaching you some basic css/html then javascript and (!) jquery and after that you start building simple projects/sites using codepen. I think codepen is really great begginer tool. You don't have to worry about bundling stuff, what text editor you use, etc. etc.
- criddell 9y ago
  Even codeacademy and freecodecamp are fairly advanced. For actual beginners, there are even simpler tools. At school, my kids were started in Scratch. They showed it to me a few weeks ago and it's very good.
jmulho 9y ago
Tools like Flash made it easy for beginners to make a giant mess. Tools like React and Angular make it easy for experts to make a giant mess.
baldfat 9y ago
I really think where Haxe is going for Web development will actually fill this place. The game engines like Godot and unity have made game development easy for beginners. I think With WebAssembly we will have higher level languages that will make web development easier for people starting. https://haxe.org/use-cases/web/ https://haxe.org/use-cases/web/
Kajayacht 9y ago
The problem is when tools that are targeted for rapid development start getting used for large, mission-critical applications. The people using these tools professionally often are not the greatest engineers and you end up with a giant mess of an application using technology that is no longer supported. The company I currently work for is in this situation right now with Oracle Forms. Going with your specific example of beginner web dev, the basic HTML site of today is Wordpress
egypturnash 9y ago
The Adobe Flash authoring environment has been rebranded as Adobe Animate now that it can output html/js/canvas content. It’s closed source of course. Long before that, however, the fairly simple to understand Actionscript 2 was replaced by the more powerful but much more complicated Actionscript 3 and it became a lot less friendly to a new programmer.
- ralusek 9y ago
  ActionScript 3 was definitely not less friendly, it just wasn't ActionScript 2. One of the most unfriendly things about ActionScript 2 was that it was just so different from other programming languages, and not in a good way. I actually was taking programming classes at the time, and they were all in Java. Almost every concept translated directly from Java to AS3. In fact, AS3 is actually a sister language to modern JavaScript, as it was simply an implementation of ECMAScript with actual classes and optional type system. AS2 was instead a very strange and inconsistent language, where having a question answered in another language was unlikely to conceptually port over.
  - Doctor_Fegg 9y ago
    AS1 was a very close relation of JavaScript, prototype inheritance and all. AS2 was based on Netscape's initial proposal for ECMAScript 4. AS3 was a more fully developed proposal for ECMAScript 4, which in turn was abandoned.
  - egypturnash 9y ago
    I always found AS3 to be a hell of a lot more verbose than AS2.
Parcissons 9y ago
Its in companys interest to prevent the growth of homemade competition- its a subtile movement, but there is also a tendency towards centralization of knowledge.
steveklabnik 9y ago
You may "enjoy" this essay from a while back https://viewsourcecode.org/why/hacking/theLittleCodersPredicament.html https://viewsourcecode.org/why/hacking/theLittleCodersPredic...
wvenable 9y ago
I totally agree. There are tools for beginners but those are just for beginners -- you have to transition to something else to do real work. Development is so complex right now but I suspect most programmers in their 20's have no idea how easy it used to be. Now certainly some tasks themselves (like cross-platform development) were near impossible in those times but that's somewhat orthogonal to the point.
- k__ 9y ago
  They had Flex, which looked really good. But somehow it didn't catch on.
  - singmajesty 9y ago
    Flex was really, really slow

dkns 9y ago

I disagree. If you're in a developer bubble you may believe that everyone is using react or angular or vue but if you're beginner you're more likely to stumble upon on something like codecademy or freecodecamp. On freecodecamp they start by teaching you some basic css/html then javascript and (!) jquery and after that you start building simple projects/sites using codepen. I think codepen is really great begginer tool. You don't have to worry about bundling stuff, what text editor you use, etc. etc.

criddell 9y ago
Even codeacademy and freecodecamp are fairly advanced. For actual beginners, there are even simpler tools. At school, my kids were started in Scratch. They showed it to me a few weeks ago and it's very good.

jmulho 9y ago

Tools like Flash made it easy for beginners to make a giant mess. Tools like React and Angular make it easy for experts to make a giant mess.

baldfat 9y ago

I really think where Haxe is going for Web development will actually fill this place. The game engines like Godot and unity have made game development easy for beginners. I think With WebAssembly we will have higher level languages that will make web development easier for people starting. https://haxe.org/use-cases/web/ https://haxe.org/use-cases/web/

Kajayacht 9y ago

The problem is when tools that are targeted for rapid development start getting used for large, mission-critical applications. The people using these tools professionally often are not the greatest engineers and you end up with a giant mess of an application using technology that is no longer supported. The company I currently work for is in this situation right now with Oracle Forms. Going with your specific example of beginner web dev, the basic HTML site of today is Wordpress

egypturnash 9y ago

The Adobe Flash authoring environment has been rebranded as Adobe Animate now that it can output html/js/canvas content. It’s closed source of course. Long before that, however, the fairly simple to understand Actionscript 2 was replaced by the more powerful but much more complicated Actionscript 3 and it became a lot less friendly to a new programmer.

ralusek 9y ago
ActionScript 3 was definitely not less friendly, it just wasn't ActionScript 2. One of the most unfriendly things about ActionScript 2 was that it was just so different from other programming languages, and not in a good way. I actually was taking programming classes at the time, and they were all in Java. Almost every concept translated directly from Java to AS3. In fact, AS3 is actually a sister language to modern JavaScript, as it was simply an implementation of ECMAScript with actual classes and optional type system. AS2 was instead a very strange and inconsistent language, where having a question answered in another language was unlikely to conceptually port over.
- Doctor_Fegg 9y ago
  AS1 was a very close relation of JavaScript, prototype inheritance and all. AS2 was based on Netscape's initial proposal for ECMAScript 4. AS3 was a more fully developed proposal for ECMAScript 4, which in turn was abandoned.
- egypturnash 9y ago
  I always found AS3 to be a hell of a lot more verbose than AS2.

Parcissons 9y ago

Its in companys interest to prevent the growth of homemade competition- its a subtile movement, but there is also a tendency towards centralization of knowledge.

steveklabnik 9y ago

You may "enjoy" this essay from a while back https://viewsourcecode.org/why/hacking/theLittleCodersPredicament.html https://viewsourcecode.org/why/hacking/theLittleCodersPredic...

wvenable 9y ago

I totally agree. There are tools for beginners but those are just for beginners -- you have to transition to something else to do real work. Development is so complex right now but I suspect most programmers in their 20's have no idea how easy it used to be. Now certainly some tasks themselves (like cross-platform development) were near impossible in those times but that's somewhat orthogonal to the point.

k__ 9y ago
They had Flex, which looked really good. But somehow it didn't catch on.
- singmajesty 9y ago
  Flex was really, really slow