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Argh, I promised myself I wouldn't come back to this thread actually; debates around this particular subject I've been part of have been tiresome =) I can assu

Argh, I promised myself I wouldn't come back to this thread actually; debates around this particular subject I've been part of have been tiresome =) I can assure you that I'm not conflating simple things like user experience vs developer experience. That was the point of the asterisk. I'm also very positive that the creator of Hypercard and Excel do _not_ think of their creation as appliance. The whole point of the discussion around computer and computer languages/systems as tool for thought, is presuming that computing can be another form of mass literacy. Let's also not get into whether this should be the case (and my opinion here is less naive that one might think); I'm just saying that this is the debate. At the risk of exaggerating and drawing an imperfect parallel, the medieval monks also considered human language literacy as a "developer" thing, e.g. "reading the Bible is a separate domain to the everyday life of a consumer". And yes, they did make beautiful books as products/appliances. Again, I'm not saying programming languages will ever be useful to learn for the masses; that's another topic of discussion. I agree very much that there is no general solution, and that tinkerers gotta tinker. Though this is orthogonal to the discussion (FYI I absolutely despise language tinkering/golfing these days; that's why I made sure to talk about this topic without talking about Mu earlier).

scroot 7y ago
> The whole point of the discussion around computer and computer languages/systems as tool for thought, is presuming that computing can be another form of mass literacy. Let's also not get into whether this should be the case (and my opinion here is less naive that one might think); I'm just saying that this is the debate. Exactly right. The Jobs line is a half-baked and perhaps half-understood take on the thinking of people like Kay, Papert, et al. Anyone curious about this line of thinking -- which has fallen way, way out of the popular computing discourse -- might want to check out Andrea diSessa's "Changing Minds" for a decent summary.

scroot 7y ago

> The whole point of the discussion around computer and computer languages/systems as tool for thought, is presuming that computing can be another form of mass literacy. Let's also not get into whether this should be the case (and my opinion here is less naive that one might think); I'm just saying that this is the debate. Exactly right. The Jobs line is a half-baked and perhaps half-understood take on the thinking of people like Kay, Papert, et al. Anyone curious about this line of thinking -- which has fallen way, way out of the popular computing discourse -- might want to check out Andrea diSessa's "Changing Minds" for a decent summary.