4 ms·

I got into programming a decade ago with Quake 2 engine forks and Neverwinter Nights private servers. You would never have avenues into that kind of thing from

by zanny 12y ago

I got into programming a decade ago with Quake 2 engine forks and Neverwinter Nights private servers. You would never have avenues into that kind of thing from the ios platform at all. It is very much like how anyone from the Windows GUI generation never touched a terminal so they do not even know what a program / file / etc really is to begin with.

marssaxman 12y ago
I don't know about that. I grew up on classic Mac OS with nary a command line in sight, and I found my way under the skin just fine. I was building compilers and writing device drivers before I ever learned how shell scripting worked. I think people who want to get inside will generally figure out how; the information is all out there for the asking. My pet theory is that there are just as many people interested in the inner workings as ever, but that we're a much smaller proportion of the total computer-using population now, and so we have a much smaller influence on the culture around computers and networks than we used to.
- zanny 12y ago
  Except getting into Windows isn't a thing, even today, and even for all but the most professional engineers behind huge companies with Microsofts ear. Literally the limit of Windows is registry editing and trying to reverse engineer the horrible contents of some file in system32. There are no guts to see, no knobs to tweak, because its one massive black box. Earlier OSes, even Mac OS, has to be much more open because resources were much more limited and you could not obscure the implementation behind the black box without degrading the experience too much. More performance let MS get away with that, and if not for modable game engines there would have been nothing in my childhood to tinker with.
e12e 12y ago
It's not the GUI per se -- I'd say that a classic smalltalk-80 system (or a pc set to boot into Pharo) would be way more "hackable" than even a standard GNU/Linux install (you can look at/change the whole window system, blitter etc while it is running). One could make a solid argument that knowing what a file/program "really is" is entirely redundant: it's all von neuman architecture after all: why make the distinction? That said, I absolutely agree on your sentiment about the ios platform being way too locked down. Most annoyingly, it's entirely arbitrary: it could very well ship with something along the lines of hypercard/applescript or something better out of the box.

by zanny 12y ago

marssaxman 12y ago

I don't know about that. I grew up on classic Mac OS with nary a command line in sight, and I found my way under the skin just fine. I was building compilers and writing device drivers before I ever learned how shell scripting worked. I think people who want to get inside will generally figure out how; the information is all out there for the asking. My pet theory is that there are just as many people interested in the inner workings as ever, but that we're a much smaller proportion of the total computer-using population now, and so we have a much smaller influence on the culture around computers and networks than we used to.

zanny 12y ago
Except getting into Windows isn't a thing, even today, and even for all but the most professional engineers behind huge companies with Microsofts ear. Literally the limit of Windows is registry editing and trying to reverse engineer the horrible contents of some file in system32. There are no guts to see, no knobs to tweak, because its one massive black box. Earlier OSes, even Mac OS, has to be much more open because resources were much more limited and you could not obscure the implementation behind the black box without degrading the experience too much. More performance let MS get away with that, and if not for modable game engines there would have been nothing in my childhood to tinker with.

e12e 12y ago

It's not the GUI per se -- I'd say that a classic smalltalk-80 system (or a pc set to boot into Pharo) would be way more "hackable" than even a standard GNU/Linux install (you can look at/change the whole window system, blitter etc while it is running). One could make a solid argument that knowing what a file/program "really is" is entirely redundant: it's all von neuman architecture after all: why make the distinction? That said, I absolutely agree on your sentiment about the ios platform being way too locked down. Most annoyingly, it's entirely arbitrary: it could very well ship with something along the lines of hypercard/applescript or something better out of the box.