3 ms·

That's a false equivalence (at least I think that's the right term). Back then, computers were by a huge barrier to entry the exclusive domain to the kind of pe

That's a false equivalence (at least I think that's the right term). Back then, computers were by a huge barrier to entry the exclusive domain to the kind of people who would grow up to read hacker news. Blindly typing in games from magazines without trying to understand them is the 1980's equivalent of "watching shit scroll by for hours makes me a Linux expert overnight". If that gives you an illusion of being able to create programs, it's the same kind of illusion that causes people to post Odesk tasks to build a Facebook clone with Outlook integrated for $200. Unleashing the power of computing to the general public is an incredible leap forward and arrogantly brushing away the riff raff and their parochial consumption is like dismissing the industrial revolution because who needs cheap cloth when you can get fine lambswool tweed? Let's not pretend that anyone of us highly skilled programmers could actually build even a small fraction of the tools we turn on and "consume" (even if for the purpose of writing new tools) on a daily basis - if not for lack of skill, although a hugely diverse range of skills did go in to it, then for sheer lack of time. Yes, we need to demystify programming and teach at least rudimentary skills in school. Taking a few years of a foreign language doesn't make you proficient in the language, and you might never need it, but understanding the abstraction behind the existence of different languages is important and useful in it's own right - in the same way, understanding in the most simplistic ways what makes a computer tic is important for understanding much of the world today.

antimagic 12y ago
I know this isn't really your main point, but I think you're probably selling short the activity of typing in code from a magazine. Firstly, the act of typing in and of itself is an advantage in the task of learning to use computers. Secondly, no-one ever typed a program in perfectly, you would have to debug the program when you made a type. Sometimes the typo would create a syntax error and your interpreter would point you directly to the offending line. Other times the typo would result in still valid syntax, but your program would crash, and the interpreter might point you in the right direction, or might not. Lastly your typo might create a bug that just made the program function incorrectly. Hands up everyone that spent a day searching for the line that had a less than rather than a greater than sign typed in! The act of debugging these very real problems (without even talking about errors in the as-printed code!) is a very real introduction to programming. Lastly, and most importantly, if you were into computers, uyou inevitably encountered code that was designed for the BASIC dialect of another computer. To make it run on yours, you have to read the code, understand what it does, and then modify it to use commands (typically graphics commands) from your computer's own dialect to make it work. At this point you're no longer even looking like you're just typing in code - it's full-on programming. At one point in my life, I carried around the information necessary to translate basic programs between TRS-80, Apple ][, Commodre-64 and TI 99/4A BASIC dialects. We have lost this heritage. You don't need to type in code, you just download it from the 'Net. That means no slow reading of the code, no debugging typos, and no attempts to transfer code from one environment to another (as most development environments these days have got pretty good at virtualising the underlying system such that it presents a consistent interface to the programmer - my Javascript webpage generally works equally well in Safari, Chrome or IE)
- mseebach 12y ago
  It's not worthless, and neither is "watching shit scroll by for hours", but I think the better signal is in the motivation and tenacity of the kind of people who set out to do this in the first place. In the 80's, this kind of people made up a very large proportion of all computer users out of sheer necessity (heck, in the 70s, you generally had to assemble your own hardware as well). Today, it's a vanishingly small fraction - but in absolute numbers, it's much much bigger, and a much much easier group to enter.
  - ErikRogneby 12y ago
    People do still assemble their own hardware and write their own dedicated programs for that hardware. The blossoming micro-controller movement is a lot like PC's were back in the day.
    - mseebach 12y ago
      Of course they do. And people write web servers in assembly. But they don't need to do it to use a computer at all.

antimagic 12y ago

I know this isn't really your main point, but I think you're probably selling short the activity of typing in code from a magazine. Firstly, the act of typing in and of itself is an advantage in the task of learning to use computers. Secondly, no-one ever typed a program in perfectly, you would have to debug the program when you made a type. Sometimes the typo would create a syntax error and your interpreter would point you directly to the offending line. Other times the typo would result in still valid syntax, but your program would crash, and the interpreter might point you in the right direction, or might not. Lastly your typo might create a bug that just made the program function incorrectly. Hands up everyone that spent a day searching for the line that had a less than rather than a greater than sign typed in! The act of debugging these very real problems (without even talking about errors in the as-printed code!) is a very real introduction to programming. Lastly, and most importantly, if you were into computers, uyou inevitably encountered code that was designed for the BASIC dialect of another computer. To make it run on yours, you have to read the code, understand what it does, and then modify it to use commands (typically graphics commands) from your computer's own dialect to make it work. At this point you're no longer even looking like you're just typing in code - it's full-on programming. At one point in my life, I carried around the information necessary to translate basic programs between TRS-80, Apple ][, Commodre-64 and TI 99/4A BASIC dialects. We have lost this heritage. You don't need to type in code, you just download it from the 'Net. That means no slow reading of the code, no debugging typos, and no attempts to transfer code from one environment to another (as most development environments these days have got pretty good at virtualising the underlying system such that it presents a consistent interface to the programmer - my Javascript webpage generally works equally well in Safari, Chrome or IE)

mseebach 12y ago
It's not worthless, and neither is "watching shit scroll by for hours", but I think the better signal is in the motivation and tenacity of the kind of people who set out to do this in the first place. In the 80's, this kind of people made up a very large proportion of all computer users out of sheer necessity (heck, in the 70s, you generally had to assemble your own hardware as well). Today, it's a vanishingly small fraction - but in absolute numbers, it's much much bigger, and a much much easier group to enter.
- ErikRogneby 12y ago
  People do still assemble their own hardware and write their own dedicated programs for that hardware. The blossoming micro-controller movement is a lot like PC's were back in the day.
  - mseebach 12y ago
    Of course they do. And people write web servers in assembly. But they don't need to do it to use a computer at all.