5 ms·
The way I see it, in: Age 0, all computer users where actually users and sys admins and programmers and EEs, then, when computers stopped being room-sized mons
by nnq 13y ago
The way I see it, in:
Age 0, all computer users where actually users and sys admins and programmers and EEs, then, when computers stopped being room-sized monsters, in
Age 1, all users were users and sys admins and programmers (the Lisp machines era is probably at the end of this age), then, when software became actually usable by most non-programmers, in
Age 2, all users were users and sys admins (the UNIX era falls in this age), then, in
Age 3, users started to be only users - or, more exactly, people who were not programmers and sys admins started to actually use computers on a large scale (the current era of Windows and Macs and everything else) - since sys admins separated themselves from the users group long after the programmers have, they are "philogenetically" closer to users than to programmers ...also, this is why I think the "Linux desktop" dream took so long to rise up, becase Unix systems by design ask users to at least be sys admins too, and reward them to the max when they are sys admins and coders too.
Now, if anyone has any idea of what comes next, please share the enlightening thoughts :)
The only witty continuations I can think of is: Age N - humans are no longer "using" the machines and they haven't done this for a long long time (well, they do, but only in the sense that a plant uses the sun, water and earth to survive), they are being used by them, grown in "human natural reservations" for scientific study purposes and historical education purposes for machines to remember how the beings that preceded them were like ...but hopefully someone else has a brighter view on the future.
- S4M 13y agoThe way I see it is: Age 4: All users are sysadmins or programmers, because the ones who are not have moved to a tablet.
- nnq 13y agoI don't see tablets as anything more than just another PC form factor... a secretary that needs to type fast will use a tablet with a keyboard and a programmer just as well. Once we go past Apple's "tablet as an appliance" dark age, as Microsoft gets more market share (yeah, I'm siding with Microsoft here (and against Google and Apple) and I think they are, willingly or not, pushing things in a better direction by having the same platform for both tablets and PCs, even if their product quality seems inferior) and Android get more and more features and starts to look like a "real OS", programmers and sys admins will be able to use tablets just as well, attaching keyboards to them when needed and plugging them into a large screen at their desks... heck, I can even imagine programmers typing code in the air on the grand-grand-...-grand-children of Google glass, with a pair of mechanic-feedback gloves or something.
- S4M 13y agoInteresting, when I wrote my first comment I was thinking that PCs would stay the machine where programmers would write software for devices dedicated to the large public (tablets, smartphones, smart glasses, smart watches, etc.), but after reading your answer I realize that I may be wrong, and as you say, those devices could very well be used as development machine. I don't know what's the state of the coders tools for smaller devices, but that's an idea PG would like to fund: http://ycombinator.com/rfs5.html http://ycombinator.com/rfs5.html
- nnq 13y agoI don't think making dev tools tailored for a specific form factor or even platform is a good idea. You can use something like Ms Surface Pro to do dev work right now with the tools already available even if they're far from perfect - this is why I like Ms's "vision" on the whole tablet saga better. What I'd really love to have (and even I'd even pay good bucks for it!) would be a browser-based-polyglot-IDE, maybe an IDE implemented as a browser extension, that would simplify the fucked up workflow of web frontend dev (none of the existing editors, IDEs or anything else properly handles the ungodly tangle of HTML/CSS/SASS/LESS/Javascript/Typescript/Dart/CoffeeScript...) and be totally platform independent so I can use it on any device and just tweak some configs to adapt it for a particular small screen size. I think "RFS 5: Development on Handhelds " has a wrong perspective, you don't want to think about development on handhelds, you need to have dev tools that are so platform independent and form factor independent that they work on anything (code-mirror seemed a nice base last time I checked, but compared to what's needed is like comparing the linux kernel with full fledged desktop linux distro...). And if you think about tools for developing native apps, I think this is "sailink a sinking ship" anyway and on top of that you could always be put out of business by Apple or Ms making an Xcode or VS version optimized for handhelds and giving away for free and "express" version that will be good enough for most. Anyway, this has veered seriously off topic, but dev tools are something I care about and I couldn't refrain from commenting on that :)
- ams6110 13y agoYou missed the mainframe era where from at least the 1970s forward you had office workers by the score who were only users.
- nnq 13y agoYou're right, I think one may say that mainframes did the Age 2 -> 3 transition first, as it was kind of necessary for their use care, and then PCs recapitulated history...