3 ms·

It's the kind of thing I definitely want for every non-technical person in my life. Which is most of them. We're not that far removed from a time when every no

It's the kind of thing I definitely want for every non-technical person in my life. Which is most of them. We're not that far removed from a time when every non-nerd's personal computer was a cess-pit of viruses and "addon search bars". It was very, very bad. It'd be much worse now given how much more sophisticated the malware scene is, and how much more connected devices are (always-on Internet wasn't even the norm in the early days of the every-computer-has-some-trojans-and-bonzai-buddy era)

tomjen3 7y ago
If I couldn't have written code on my first computer, would I have been the programmer I am today? Would I even have been a programmer? I don't know. And that part scares me.
- shantly 7y ago
  Learning programming's easier even on an iPad than it was on, say, mid-90s desktops, overall. Granted earlier systems that booted straight to a programming environment forced you to grapple with code to do much with them, but they were a hell of a lot less accessible to the average person than a Raspberry Pi, say, price-wise. Even the crappy ones were a lot more expensive than that, especially inflation-adjusted. The future is probably 10,000x as many total computing devices, most of which will be fairly locked down and not as hobbyist-programmer friendly as we've been used to but much better & safer for most folks—but also 100x as many tinkering-friendly computers, and much cheaper than they were "back in the day", and 1,000x the encouragement and free or cheap resources to learn to program as we had. My concern level that current trends will make programming anything other than more accessible, generally, to kids than it was back in the good ol' days, approaches zero. Even if the percentage of computing devices that are tinkering-friendly drops.

3 ms·

It's the kind of thing I definitely want for every non-technical person in my life. Which is most of them. We're not that far removed from a time when every no

by shantly 7y ago

tomjen3 7y ago
If I couldn't have written code on my first computer, would I have been the programmer I am today? Would I even have been a programmer? I don't know. And that part scares me.
- shantly 7y ago
  Learning programming's easier even on an iPad than it was on, say, mid-90s desktops, overall. Granted earlier systems that booted straight to a programming environment forced you to grapple with code to do much with them, but they were a hell of a lot less accessible to the average person than a Raspberry Pi, say, price-wise. Even the crappy ones were a lot more expensive than that, especially inflation-adjusted. The future is probably 10,000x as many total computing devices, most of which will be fairly locked down and not as hobbyist-programmer friendly as we've been used to but much better & safer for most folks—but also 100x as many tinkering-friendly computers, and much cheaper than they were "back in the day", and 1,000x the encouragement and free or cheap resources to learn to program as we had. My concern level that current trends will make programming anything other than more accessible, generally, to kids than it was back in the good ol' days, approaches zero. Even if the percentage of computing devices that are tinkering-friendly drops.