>We don’t have the Alan Kay / Free Software / Hypercard dream of everybody having control over their own computer because integrating with disparate APIs is rea

>We don’t have the Alan Kay / Free Software / Hypercard dream of everybody having control over their own computer because integrating with disparate APIs is really fucking hard and takes a lot of work to do. A couple weeks ago there was a conversation here about software in the 90s where the argument was proposed that as an industry, software veered off in the wrong direction somewhere along the way. When I read the above from the article, there's a part of me that starts feeling this...we have all this horsepower in both hardware and software such that it should be as "easy" for people to make software in the same way they can now make pictures, music, and videos without needing hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in a movie or recording studio. Like, these are mutually exclusive points - you can have APIs that maybe are a step beyond, but does that mean that all software must be hard to write? I was telling my son just last night about how people did all these cool, unexpected things with Hypercard back in the day. It didn't need to be perfect, it didn't need to be "enterprise grade" because it was easy to make and was good enough for what people wanted to do.