Even more important is the nature of PCs vs mobile devices. The mobile platform is designed to commoditize the user and create a stark division between users on one side and content and software creators on the other. You can't easily create anything of any substance on a mobile device and the ecosystem discourages it by e.g. treating user data as unimportant.
PCs were designed to be devices for people to create things.
Its largely a product of when the two platforms were created and the economic forces at play. I wonder what mobile devices designed to empower the user would be like?
PCs were designed to be devices for people to create things.
I think you have an idealized view of how most people use PCs. Even during the first era of PCs in the 80s, most kids used them for playing games.
By the mid 90s, it was all about games and “multimedia” on CDs.
Then Facebook and social media games.
The geeks that looked forward to InCider, Nybble, and whatever the offshoot computer mag from 3-2-1 Contact were and typed BASIC programs in were the minority.
The geeks that looked forward to InCider, Nybble, and whatever the offshoot computer mag from 3-2-1 Contact were and typed BASIC programs in were the minority.
But if you look at the PC magazines from the late 80s/early 90s, magazines not even oriented at "developers" but more "power users", you'll find huge chunks of content devoted to programming --- not just BASIC, but Asm (DOS's DEBUG command was the preferred method of creating small utilities), undocumented features, controlling hardware, and the like. Programming was viewed more as a progression/spectrum from novice -> power user -> programmer, with the result that a lot of users knew the basic concepts of how computers worked and would not have much trouble making little modifications to the Asm listings they found in order to customise them to their needs.
Contrast this with the locked-down walled-garden ecosystems where you can't even easily control the behaviour of, much less write programs for, on the device you bought!
> But if you look at the PC magazines from the late 80s/early 90s
What was the reach of those magazines? When I was young I was the only one in my high school class with a computer. There was some self-selection going on.
Today, with $300 (inflated dollars, so much cheaper than in the past) you can get a very nice laptop and program your heart away if you so want.
Those people who would have read those magazines are now on various internet programming/forums, hacking minecraft. It's only the magazines which disappeared because now there are better ways to disseminate technical info. The absolute numbers of hackers probably remained similar, it's just that now there are a ton more computer users, so they get diluted.
My first experience programming on computers was o a demo version of VB4 (could not export .EXE), and later on JavaScript (copying and pasting things from the Internet).
Nowadays it's even easier to learn how to program without paying anything.
> I think you have an idealized view of how most people use PCs.
I don't think that he has an idealized view per se. It is rather that people who bring up such arguments often are surrounded by similar minded people, which is some kind of echo chamber. So people who bring these arguments actually have observed lots of people using their PC/smartphone. Unluckily this "lots of people" sample is strongly biased towards their echo chamber.
Of course, but having the technical possibility to create something on the machine make this minority exists in the first place. Now take the same demographic with a locked down class of devices and the basic programming crowd fall to 0%.
With iOS 12, Apple will be integrating automation that lets you automate actions within other programs either visually or from what I’ve read JavaScript. Just imagine what kids can do when they can use their phone to automate smart home devices.
Yes, I know Apple wants to police their App Store, but writing something for your own personal use (and maybe to give some copies to friends) shouldn't be a huge bureaucratic hurdle.
(Android has smaller hurdles but still not insignificant --- when the first step in the tutorial is "download and install this gigabyte-sized piece of software", you can be sure a ton of potential users have already been put-off. Compare with early home computers that booted to a BASIC prompt, or PCs where DEBUG was there and ready to create tiny/small "apps" immediately.)
How will it be a huge hurdle to write your own Siri actions that can control other apps on your phone and your smart devices with iOS 12? You can look on the Internet to see what people have been doing with the Workflow app (the app that Apple acquired and is integrating into iOS) without Apple’s hooks.
Well, you are speaking about an OS that isn’t publicly released. I’m speaking about programming capabilities of iPhone et al. as they are right now and have been in the last 10 years.
Besides the Swift playground nothing is really close to real programming. Even worse, it relies on expensive+ external hardware of questionable utility (the "smart" devices) that repetitively shown how insecure they are. And Alexa is a whole problem of its own given the huge privacy thread it is. I will definitely not teach my kids about happily wasting money on GAFAM/PRISM surveillance tools.
+I would rather spend 40€ on a raspberry PI than a smart light bulb or anything like that.
Writing my first program in Applesift Basic wasn’t “real programming” either even in 1986 but it was my gateway that got me interested.
Programming with Swift playgrounds or doing an Automator action that can control smart home devices will hold kids interests way more than “real programming”.
I was excited in 1985 at 12 just to be able print something on the screen. More recently I was asked to give a presentation to some kids during career day. Knowing that they wouldn’t be interested in a talk about doing yet another SAAS app, I recommended that they talk to a friend who does game development.
If they were younger, I would definitely recommend a presentation on automating smart home devices activated by Siri or Alexa.
I strongly disagree. I use my tablet for painting and sketching, composing music, and sometimes a bit of writing. These devices are amazing for content creation.
They’re currently not good at programming, which is a small subset of content creation. This problem plagued personal computers for a long while as well. For example, Apple’s Lisa could only be programmed by attaching it to a second Lisa (which was extremely expensive). Being able to program your computer with itself wasn’t always common.
These are early days still. Tablets will get there some day. It’s a techical problem, and technical problems have techical solutions. Give it time.
I think it's also a governance problem. The relative inability to program within itself reduces the number of bricked devices. A bricked device either becomes a cost to the manufacturer, a cost to the consumer, or can be quickly reflashed by the consumer. Not only does reflashing likely require a second device to do so, but it also works against the locked secure bootloader concept which is such a popular (albeit controversial) feature to keep these ecosystems healthy.
The days when you could compile an exe without any kind of signing and distribute it with nobody getting a warning about an unknown developer were the days when everyone was bluescreening monthly; hardly a coincidence.
Programming is getting better. I regularly use my iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard to hack over SSH/MOSH, and often just use the onscreen keyboard for short edits. Vim is surprisingly usable with it, actually; modal editing is a natural paradigm for a touch screen.
There are bluetooth keyboards for tablets. I spend most of my laptop time on a browser and in ssh, both of which I can do effectively on a tablet with a keyboard.
PCs were designed to be devices for people to create things.
Its largely a product of when the two platforms were created and the economic forces at play. I wonder what mobile devices designed to empower the user would be like?