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Personally I see the ossified bifurcation between users and developers as a major defeat that perhaps I won't live to see reversed. It was not set in stone tha
by muyuu 4y ago
Personally I see the ossified bifurcation between users and developers as a major defeat that perhaps I won't live to see reversed.
It was not set in stone that people would be by design dumbed down progressively as computing caught on, rather than assimilated into the computing world as 1st class citizens.
In a parallel universe something like the Smalltalk, LISP or Forth machines were widely adopted and the dichotomy between user and developer was blurred to mean an incidental situation related to a specific set of code.
It's hard to even convey in words how damaging it is, and can still be much worse, that the user was corralled first as a consumer and then as the product. Wholesale across all the industry. And the sad thing is that it wasn't like this, at all, as late as the 1980s.
- scarface74 4y agoYes and I’m sure that car mechanics are also tsk tsking about everyone that drives a car doesn’t know how to fix one. I’m sure they also thing that cars have been “dumbed down”. I’ve been programming for a long time (since doing assembly in the 80s). My second job out of college was for a small company where I was a developer and also had to manage a SAN, a dozen computers that ran jobs, mail servers, ftp servers, MySQL and SQL Servers, messaging servers (MQSeries, MSMQ) etc. Now I can just write some yaml or HCL and spin up an entire “server room”. I don’t wax poetically to juniors who never have to go through that and I even encourage them to use an even higher level of abstraction - the CDK that allows you to use code to create the yaml. Ob Disclaimers: yes I work at AWS now (ProServe). 2nd disclaimer: while the CDK creates CloudFormation, Hashicorp ported it to work with Terraform and is cross platform.
- muyuu 4y agoI don't think the car mechanics analogy goes very far(tehe) but it could be done with some consumer electronics, as long as the integration and coupling of software and hardware has worked much more against the people than it has benefited them. Granted, it's not for everything. But by losing computing we lost a lot more, too.
- scarface74 4y agoHow so, I think the modern iPhone works a lot better for most people than my old Apple //e or the first PCs I used ever did.
- muyuu 4y agoi don't think you've read the above messages wholly, or if so you have missed the point
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