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As someone said "genius" or experts are always special. Just because everybody uses a computer, it does not mean that everybody will be the next Euler. But it

As someone said "genius" or experts are always special. Just because everybody uses a computer, it does not mean that everybody will be the next Euler. But it does not mean either than there are not going to be more Eulers. Quite the contrary, the barriers to know for those that want it are smaller than ever. And there is people that care. They are a minority, but they are there. The worst thing you could do is to try to force it to all, as what was a pleasure becomes a sin as Feynman realized.

vidarh 14y ago
As a demonstration of the difference in barriers: When I was 10 I wanted to learn assembly. I didn't have any books about it. None of my friends did. This was 1985, so I didn't have internet access (nor would I have a modem for another 7 years). My local library had some low level books on electronics with vague descriptions of how CPU's worked. None of the local book stores had anything. We "knew" we had to get machine instructions into memory somehow, but we didn't know how they were encoded, and we didn't know anything about how even BASIC was encoded in memory on our C64's. But we tried to figure it out, and got pretty much nowhere. At some point we resorted to trying to POKE the names of BASIC keywords into memory. Not only was it not assembler, it's not even how C64 BASIC does it. Our efforts petered out. After ages I got hold of a pirated copy of an assembler written in BASIC that I could start figuring out. It got me a bit further, but not much. It was first one or two years later I finally got hold of decent quality assembler and tutorials and started learning assembler properly. I do think it's sad that programming is not made more "visible", though. E.g. take automation. Most OS X apps supports being automated with AppleScript, but how many users even know it exists? Increasingly Linux applications supports automation via DBus, but it's the same situation. I've not seen widespread usage of cross-application automation since ARexx on AmigaOS, which turned a large number of casual users into programmers (even if it was "only" for simple stuff to automate their own workflows) despite how horribly lacking ARexx is in user-friendliness, simply because it helped them get their stuff done better and they could start small (one line scripts to tell an application to do something when they pressed some icon, for example) and build on that. Just making automation tools more discoverable would be a major step towards getting people more interested.

vidarh 14y ago

As a demonstration of the difference in barriers: When I was 10 I wanted to learn assembly. I didn't have any books about it. None of my friends did. This was 1985, so I didn't have internet access (nor would I have a modem for another 7 years). My local library had some low level books on electronics with vague descriptions of how CPU's worked. None of the local book stores had anything. We "knew" we had to get machine instructions into memory somehow, but we didn't know how they were encoded, and we didn't know anything about how even BASIC was encoded in memory on our C64's. But we tried to figure it out, and got pretty much nowhere. At some point we resorted to trying to POKE the names of BASIC keywords into memory. Not only was it not assembler, it's not even how C64 BASIC does it. Our efforts petered out. After ages I got hold of a pirated copy of an assembler written in BASIC that I could start figuring out. It got me a bit further, but not much. It was first one or two years later I finally got hold of decent quality assembler and tutorials and started learning assembler properly. I do think it's sad that programming is not made more "visible", though. E.g. take automation. Most OS X apps supports being automated with AppleScript, but how many users even know it exists? Increasingly Linux applications supports automation via DBus, but it's the same situation. I've not seen widespread usage of cross-application automation since ARexx on AmigaOS, which turned a large number of casual users into programmers (even if it was "only" for simple stuff to automate their own workflows) despite how horribly lacking ARexx is in user-friendliness, simply because it helped them get their stuff done better and they could start small (one line scripts to tell an application to do something when they pressed some icon, for example) and build on that. Just making automation tools more discoverable would be a major step towards getting people more interested.