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> One can only conclude that the makers of Unix held, and still hold, the ordinary computer user in total contempt, and this viewpoint seems to me to be mirrore

by scroot 6y ago

> One can only conclude that the makers of Unix held, and still hold, the ordinary computer user in total contempt, and this viewpoint seems to me to be mirrored in the attitudes of the people who are inflicting this awful system on the rest of us. Does Unix's enormously steep learning curve have any function other than to deter the faint-hearted, those who may want to use computers without necessarily dedicating their lives to them? It does not seem fanciful to suggest that Unix is primarily about separating out the elite from the proletariat, the real programmers from the quiche-eaters. I think it's worth pointing out that in the 80s/90s (and in the research in personal computing that preceded that period), there was a very different attitude about what it could mean to "use a computer." The demarcation between a "user" and a "programmer" was not so clear. Today it is stark. The author is sort of joking with this line, but it's likely that the unixification of computing has contributed to this divide.

dsego 6y ago
As someone who grew up with Win 95 and remember the Atari and Amiga in the early to mid 90s, Linux would surely seem archaic even at that time. I'm sure my preteen cousin who was showing my even younger self cool games and apps on the Atari didn't write a single line of code and I doubt a large percentage of ordinary computer users were writing much code at the time. Someone using a computer could be seen as more technical to people who didn't want to touch it, but not more than a school kid showing her grandpa how to use an Android phone nowadays.
- scroot 6y ago
  I think about tools like Hypercard, Applescript, and other systems that really allowed "users" to easily do things that today we might view as strictly the purview of "programmers". These kinds of things are no longer popular, but it's not because they were never popular, nor is it because they didn't "work." Our culture changed.
rbanffy 6y ago
> but it's likely that the unixification of computing has contributed to this divide. It took a long time until a meaningful part of humanity got access to computers. The fraction that had access to timeshared machines via serial terminals was tiny. In the age of the PET, the Apple II, the C64, it was usual to boot up your home computer and be greeted by a BASIC prompt (REPL, if you allow me). It was an immediate introduction to programming - a language was there, built into the computer's firmware, and you could just start writing code one second after powering the thing up. You could write programs that looked comparable to what you could buy at a store or type in from a magazine. CP/M and then MS/DOS were a bit different. You were dropped into an OS shell rather than a programming environment. In order to program, you needed to explicitly start an interpreter or a text editor. You still could write programs that looked like professional apps on the platform, but you had to get a language, which was not usually provided. Then the GUIs came. Now, in order to write programs for Windows, or the Mac (oh boy!), or anything else graphical, you needed to get developer tools. Microsoft's came in a crate. A Hello World app would be hundreds of lines. In order to make something useful that looked decent, you'd need to learn a lot. By then, most timeshared system users were left behind, as terminals couldn't cope with user expectations. What was once a small crack is now a vast chasm.
- scroot 6y ago
  I'm with you, but want to add that this transition isn't the fault of GUIs. The group at PARC that invented the GUI that everyone else commercialized had invented the GUI equivalent of "booting into a BASIC" -- Smalltalk. Which brings me to another point: this divide has gone hand in hand with the idea that parts of a computing system should be universally swappable. But that prevents any "holistic" nature to a computing system, and therefore we get caught up in the idea of individual languages rather than environment and how everything works together.

by scroot 6y ago

dsego 6y ago

As someone who grew up with Win 95 and remember the Atari and Amiga in the early to mid 90s, Linux would surely seem archaic even at that time. I'm sure my preteen cousin who was showing my even younger self cool games and apps on the Atari didn't write a single line of code and I doubt a large percentage of ordinary computer users were writing much code at the time. Someone using a computer could be seen as more technical to people who didn't want to touch it, but not more than a school kid showing her grandpa how to use an Android phone nowadays.

scroot 6y ago
I think about tools like Hypercard, Applescript, and other systems that really allowed "users" to easily do things that today we might view as strictly the purview of "programmers". These kinds of things are no longer popular, but it's not because they were never popular, nor is it because they didn't "work." Our culture changed.

rbanffy 6y ago

> but it's likely that the unixification of computing has contributed to this divide. It took a long time until a meaningful part of humanity got access to computers. The fraction that had access to timeshared machines via serial terminals was tiny. In the age of the PET, the Apple II, the C64, it was usual to boot up your home computer and be greeted by a BASIC prompt (REPL, if you allow me). It was an immediate introduction to programming - a language was there, built into the computer's firmware, and you could just start writing code one second after powering the thing up. You could write programs that looked comparable to what you could buy at a store or type in from a magazine. CP/M and then MS/DOS were a bit different. You were dropped into an OS shell rather than a programming environment. In order to program, you needed to explicitly start an interpreter or a text editor. You still could write programs that looked like professional apps on the platform, but you had to get a language, which was not usually provided. Then the GUIs came. Now, in order to write programs for Windows, or the Mac (oh boy!), or anything else graphical, you needed to get developer tools. Microsoft's came in a crate. A Hello World app would be hundreds of lines. In order to make something useful that looked decent, you'd need to learn a lot. By then, most timeshared system users were left behind, as terminals couldn't cope with user expectations. What was once a small crack is now a vast chasm.

scroot 6y ago
I'm with you, but want to add that this transition isn't the fault of GUIs. The group at PARC that invented the GUI that everyone else commercialized had invented the GUI equivalent of "booting into a BASIC" -- Smalltalk. Which brings me to another point: this divide has gone hand in hand with the idea that parts of a computing system should be universally swappable. But that prevents any "holistic" nature to a computing system, and therefore we get caught up in the idea of individual languages rather than environment and how everything works together.