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Of course, as the current top comment mentions: because most people don’t want to make programs. Computing in the 80s was limited to nerds, business users and a
by joeman1000 3y ago
Of course, as the current top comment mentions: because most people don’t want to make programs. Computing in the 80s was limited to nerds, business users and a school kids. All of these groups have some incentive or drive to write programs, above that of the average person from the population.
Anyway, this is not an excuse for the state of operating systems today, which dissuade people towards programming. Yes, I even mean Unix-like operating systems. Why? Simply because the mental gap between ‘programs as we use them’ and ‘programs as we write them’ is so large on a modern OS. Consumers are stuck essentially playing in the sandpit and don’t really learn anything about computing while they use the computer. Unless of course they have some weird drive that helps them weather the pain of going against the tide and actually learning what’s going on in their computer.
There is very little you can learn from an application (such as Firefox, telegram etc.) because they offer zero introspection and are completely alien things compared to how they are conjured.
Think of the Apple II, there was very little gap between using the ‘OS’, making a program and using a program. They were nearly the same thing, or felt the same.
How would you interact with the computer? Enter some text. How did you make a program? Enter some text and save it. How did you run and interact with the program? …
Alan Kay talks about this a lot. If you imagine Smalltalk (now Squeak) as an OS, the gap between programming and using programs is tiny, so you learn by consuming and thus the leap to proficiency isn’t so big.
Another great counter-example is emacs. It offers introspection info everything and lets you modify a lot of its behaviour in a uniform way. I thing this is why people like it so much. You learn it as you use it and you’re encouraged to modify it. It’s a far cry from how most software is made today.