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Personally I can't help but think that this is our fault, as an industry, for abandoning the idea that users should be able to create programs. In the 8-bit mic
by AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
Personally I can't help but think that this is our fault, as an industry, for abandoning the idea that users should be able to create programs. In the 8-bit micro era computers booted into a programming environment, then we had things like QBasic coming standard with the OS, then things like VB, HyperCard, Delphi, and to a lesser extent Excel and Access. For a while, enabling users to create their own tools to suit their needs was considered valuable in personal computing.
That's not how we do things anymore. Now everything is an appliance and the user is cattle as far as the developer is concerned.
- TremendousJudge 6y agoI don't think it was the developers who made that call though.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoI think it was. Talk about how horrible it is to pile so many abstraction layers together and developers will come out of the woodwork to talk about how much time it saves them. In a lot of cases, developers are rewriting things over and over again in the latest framework-du-jour simply to pad their resumes when they abandon their current employer in two years. Then they turn around and put all the blame on other people like children.
- dTal 6y agoTo expand on this, developer culture is to view good human factors almost as a badge of shame. If you press the issue with "this is a horrible experience that gets in your way in a thousand tiny and not so tiny ways", the response is almost always "if you can't handle tiny inconvenience #386, you weren't cut out to be a programmer". Witness the sheer scorn heaped on GUIs. It's a kind of gatekeeping behavior - "I suffered through memorizing a bunch of git commands by rote, and now you have to as well."