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Modern computing: A short history and a shorter rant

43 points by dpkendal 13y ago

billyjobob 13y ago
Programming is easy, after all: all you need to understand is conditions and repetition. If you believe that you have never tried to teach a class of non-programmers. Instead, programming keeps getting harder on new computers all the time, especially ones made by Apple Apple have made a lot of efforts to bring programming to the common user: Hypercard, Applescript, Automator. They are abandoned because no-one was interested in using them.
- atmosx 13y ago
  And no one is using them because simplification of any complex subject has limits. And when you pass those limits your tool, theory or conjuncture becomes either incomplete or obsolete. So the professionals avoid your tool spending their time on a worthy one (objective-c) and amateurs are too confused on how to use properly it anyway.
- dpkendal 13y ago
  “If you believe that you have never tried to teach a class of non-programmers.” No, you’re trying to teach them with the same kind of tool that I call ‘clumsy and unsophisticated’ in the article. “Apple have made a lot of efforts to bring programming to the common user: Hypercard, Applescript, Automator. They are abandoned because no-one was interested in using them.” In many ways HyperCard was still too difficult, but it was a great tool. Many people did use it to make simple programs, and some became programmers from it. I’m not arguing that everyone should learn to program to the level of being able to create and sell apps; HyperCard is a good example in that sense. AppleScript is a failure because it’s a terribly difficult language even for most working programmers. Its designers completely failed in that respect. Automator is not programming.
  - antimagic 13y ago
    Yes, but you took Apple to task, singling them out as the worst offender, when this clearly isn't the case - Apple really have tried to make programming accessible to the masses. OK, so Automator failed, but at least they tried. When was the last time you installed a linux distribution that came with graphically-assisted scripting out of the box that was more polished than Automator? Oh, that's right, never. Also, your whole premise is just wrong. There's been a ton of research showing that the hard thing about programming is not syntax, or tooling, but thinking in abstract terms (I'd link, but I don't have access to most academic publications these days :( ). You're not the first person to think "Hey, if only we could make this whole programming thing more accessible to everyone, everyone would do it!" And yet nobody has succeeded, or even gone close. The best we've managed is to make it easier for an interested amateur to learn to program normally. We've got good documentation available on the Web. Every PC can easily install a wide range of language development environments, for free. Large numbers of frameworks are available to allow you to avoid having to do the heavy lifting for areas where you don't have the time / brainpower to become a subject matter expert. These are all positive developments, but the fact is that 99% of the population still can't even explain in plain English (or Spanish, or Chinese or whatever it is they speak) to a developer what it is they want a system to do. When was the last time you saw a spec written by a non-programmer trying to explain a business process? Did they even try to explain what happens in error cases? If they did you were a lucky sort, because I've seen dozens of these types of documents, and none contained information on how to handle error conditions. They'll tell you to pull an employee out of the database based on the name, without stopping to think that several employees might have the same name, so you need to have some unique identifier. They'll tell you that an action needs to be done on the first of the month, but they'll forget to tell you what to do when the first of the month is actually a public holiday. These are the problems that we, as programmers, are trained to deal with, and which most people just don't seem capable of doing. And "easy" tools aren't going to help them, because the problem isn't the tools, it's the abstract thinking.
  - Double_Cast 13y ago
    > No, you’re trying to teach them with the same kind of tool that I call ‘clumsy and unsophisticated’ in the article. Despite the vitriol you've received, I think I understand what you're trying to say here. I think you want a higher level programming language. And not merely a successor to the latest zeitgeist, but essentially what C was to punch tape. That is, binary might be fundamental to computation, but it isn't fundamental to the ergonomics of programming. So the question is, is it possible to somehow abstract programming to an higher level? pg wrote that all other language have evolved towards lisp. I think the trend is a special case of a trend towards functional programming. So imho, whatever comes next (given there is a next) will have to (for lack of a better word, ) supersede lambda calculus.
    - dpkendal 13y ago
      You seem to be the only person in this thread who has grasped this idea; though instinctively to me it feels another formalism like LC is the wrong way to go.
      - Double_Cast 13y ago
        I'm new to programming, so I don't have much street cred. But I've heard others call LC "the assembly language of math"[1]. And I think functionals are really neat. So imho, I suspect LC's more than a formalism. But it drives me up the wall that it doesn't have an elegant subtraction analog. This leads me to believe there must be something better. The answer sure can't be the Apple thing you mentioned. I imagine it's a just a gui, a kludge. But if not LC, then what do you think? [1] http://matt.might.net/articles/compiling-up-to-lambda-calculus/ http://matt.might.net/articles/compiling-up-to-lambda-calcul...
  - ericHosick 13y ago
    > Automator is not programming. Automator is not coding.
- jjoonathan 13y ago
  I wish I had more than one upvote to give, you hit it on the head. Apple of all companies has tried repeatedly (and failed repeatedly) to bring programming to the masses. It doesn't seem to matter if you format the task so that it looks like making a slideshow, pressing a record button / writing English prose, or moving + connecting blocks. Programming still requires that the programmer be able to break an abstract task into concrete chunks, and even though there was a plausible argument that Hypercard/Applescript/Automator might have made the task easier or more discoverable, it didn't turn out to be the case. I learned to code in AppleScript Studio, so I know what I'm talking about here: moving to C/ObjC felt like a breath of fresh air, not a hurdle. Syntax, pointers, and memory management were much easier to learn than the nuances of the strange restricted subset of English that was AppleScript. Before you learn to break things down, no analogy (or even record button) is going to help you write code. After you learn how to break things down, an expressive language + good documentation is simply the best tool for the job. Also, with XCode/Instruments downloadable for free, easier to use, and more powerful than ever, I think it's a bit silly to slam Apple for this one. There might be an argument for slamming Microsoft, but VS Express isn't that bad IMO. There is definitely an argument for slamming nix, but decentralized authority is inherently incompatible with the kind of reform that would make the nix desktop programming experience more palatable to newcomers and open source libraries are a boon for function discovery, so it's still a bit of a wash. Web development as a desktop platform has inarguably improved by leaps and bounds over the past few years. StackOverflow has dramatically smoothed the learning process for all of these. I'm pretty sure the long term trend is exactly the opposite of what OP said: getting started with programming has never been easier, and the people who make programming environments have been working tirelessly and trying everything in their power (even moonshots) to make the process easier and more newcomer-friendly. None of the moonshots worked but the more traditional efforts have paid off in spades.
- moocowduckquack 13y ago
  I have tried to explain how computers work to people who were determined not to understand it. Once I had ditched any mention of numbers or maths and described "the toilet paper game" where you get a marker pen and make marks on a roll of toilet paper, then I found they had no problems. Personally I reckon that you can teach programming to anyone who can learn a card game.
CmonDev 13y ago
Programming is as easy as painting: either your brain is wired correctly or you work hard to re-wire it.
aestra 13y ago
Programming is easy to the programmers. Art is easy to the artist. Writing is easy to the writer. Music is easy to the musician.
- dpkendal 13y ago
  I am a programmer, writer and musician, but I don’t find any of them easy. Programming is unique, though, because the tools you use to do it can also be used to make the task in general much easier.
  - cust_support 13y ago
    Thank you Snowflake for pointing to yourself as an argument against an obvious fallacy. Too bad you also took the opportunity to post another one.
  - aestra 13y ago
    Should have explained. Some people find some tasks come natural to them so they think they are inherently easy for everyone. while others find other tasks come naturally to them. Humans are different. Music is more or less impossible for me. I am sure programming is impossible for someone else. Math is logical and easy to me. I used to tutor my friends after school on the homework that was assigned thinking "how us this not not completely straightforward to you, this is simple." yet they thought things I couldn't grasp were simple. Lets not ignore differences in humans and say programming is easy because it isn't to a large number of people. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/is-it-true-that-not-everyone-can-be-a-programmer/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/is-it-...
  - hsmyers 13y ago
    One of my favorite differences between my painting and my programming is that it is much easier to clean up my work space after programming---no brushes to clean :)
qznc 13y ago
I am torn on this. On the one hand, programming is empowering, so everybody should learn some programming in school. On the other hand, a powerful tool is also dangerous. Look at the financial sector using complex Excel sheets nobody understands anymore. As the world gets more and more dependent on software, we need more professionalism in software engineering.
- fenollp 13y ago
  Complex ¬= Powerful. Simple is Powerful. > we need more professionalism in software engineering. I completely agree. I think we need courses on The Mindset of Coding, teaching things like some of Bret Victor's principles, KISS, the UNIX philosophy, reverse engineering, …
  - csmuk 13y ago
    This is the most sensible thing I've heard for years.
  - Double_Cast 13y ago
    What does "powerful" even mean? Each time I open an article on HN describing the virtues of the latest programming language, I always see the word "powerful". Whether a language is Assembly or Python, the author can guarantee it's "powerful". I think it's devolved into a buzzword because programmers use it to mean opposite things. It's like how Orwell said two critics can describe the same painting as possessing both "a living quality" and "a peculiar deadliness" [1]. Like I said in another comment, programmers were able to abstract binary away from the tangibility of punch tape. But I think we can only abstract so much before we begin to hit a wall, beyond of which we begin to lose absolutely essential features. So once we reach such a point, I think complexity becomes conserved. So if we want to simplify one thing, the best we can often do is move the complexity elsewhere. Like a what a refrigerator does with heat. When programmers say a low level language like C is simple and powerful, they mean that the implementation is simple, but the interface is complex [2]. But when programmers say that a high level language like Python is simple and powerful, they mean that the implementation is complex, but the interface is simple. So I think the real question is, "Where is the complexity hiding?" [1] https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm [2] http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
deleted 13y ago
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dsego 13y ago
Oh my, if only apple wasn't around, folks would spend their days happily typing code in vim or emacs.
- sp332 13y ago
  Isn't that in the category of difficult things that aren't necessarily part of programming?
- JasonFruit 13y ago
  Honestly, I think there's some truth to that. If it weren't for the Macintosh, the WIMP approach to computing might never have become as dominant, and text-based systems might be more prevalent; I agree with the article's assertion that text-based programs are simpler to conceive and write.
  - nsxwolf 13y ago
    No one ever believes this when it's said, but it's true. WYSIWYG took a long time to catch on. Wordperfect for DOS was still pretty popular in 1995. People just think it "makes sense" to work directly with various fonts and sizes when writing on a page, but that's actually pretty unnatural. No one ever worked that way before - you'd bang out a draft on a typewriter and hand it to a typesetter who would take care of that part. It took at least a decade for people to really accept it in earnest.
discreditable 13y ago
It's not that programming is extremely difficult, it's that many people are barely functional on a computer to begin with.
thyrsus 13y ago
I'd appreciate some examples of tools that make programming "easy". Easier than assembler? OK, check. Easy in general? I want that.
- dpkendal 13y ago
  Bret Victor is working on some amazing stuff right now. I suggest his talk Drawing Dynamic Visualizations to see how he’s making programing more direct and less “code”-ish: http://vimeo.com/66085662 http://vimeo.com/66085662
- walshemj 13y ago
  Editors and IDE's that do code high lighting make finding some types of bug much easier. I can recall the old days of printing out on fan fold paper and going through with a highlighter to debug a missing " or }
zwieback 13y ago
Horses for courses - I've been programming since the pre-GUI era and much as I love modern IDEs and advanced interfaces I still find text entry of traditional programming language code via keyboard incredibly expressive for many things.
alanctgardner2 13y ago
People seem to think the difficulty in coding is the mechanical act of writing code. "If only you could draw code!", they cry, linking together a series of blocks to represent program flow. The thing is, even if you make a language where it's impossible to fail (every program does something, it's visually intuitive when a program isn't valid), it still doesn't necessarily do the right thing. The difficulty in programming isn't the mechanical act of writing code; we have copy-paste for that. The problem is having a mental model of the program execution, and mapping it to the real-world problem. This is the difference between good and bad programmers, and it applies to the population at large. Case in point: I'm working with some soon-to-be grads from a CS program. In Java, one of them instantiated a class, and set an attribute of that instance. Elsewhere they instantiated a new instance, and tried to read the value back. And they couldn't understand why the value wasn't set, Portal-style, in their new instance. This guy, who has been in school for 4 years for CS, also couldn't figure out why it made sense to make specific shapes (circle, square, triangle) children of an abstract Shape class. He could, very easily, add a Search bar to an Android app because he had seen a tutorial on how to do it - but making the bar do anything was a tremendous feat, because it wasn't just the mechanical repetition of some pattern. Even with experienced (>5 years) programmers, I've seen some really terrible debugging where it was clear the person didn't have a mental model of the code. They never really got any benefit from GDB, because when they looked at the internal state of the program they just shrugged and said "Yeah, looks right". And they owned the codebase. This was their code, and they couldn't reason about it. After all that ranting, my point is: you can make it easier to write some program, but you can't make it (appreciably) easier to write the program that you need.
- williamcotton 13y ago
  > And they couldn't understand why the value wasn't set, Portal-style, in their new instance. Is it possible that these students might have other types of intelligence? I've got friends who are very strong visually and they thrive in visual environments such as MaxMSP and Quartz Composer. They make amazing interactive art pieces. Yet, they seem completely baffled by general purpose programming and symbolic logic. The thing is, you can talk to them and they can absolutely reason about things. They're not incapable of logic, rather a certain expression of logic. What worries me is that we've created a negative feedback loop. The tools we've created for computing are heavily dependent on symbolic logic. This attracts people who are gifted with symbolic logic. They in turn create more tools that work best for people excel at symbolic logic. And so on and so forth. I don't think this is an issue with people being incapable of creating mental models. A gymnast has an amazing mental model of their body and it's relation to space and the things in that space. However, we have yet to create computing tools for interactive design that build on top of that mental model. Why is that? Because we engineers have some of the WORST mental models of how our bodies flow through space. I think this is all mainly an issue with listening, understanding and compassion, traits that seem to be stunted in the software industry. Engineers seem to have a certain predilection to talk over people. We seem to always be waiting for the other person to stop talking. And I'll take the poetic license one step further and say that our entire industry is incapable of listening. It is always "hey, lets set up coding camps"! What about, "hey, let's set up a symposium where us engineers listen to other people about how they live their lives and what they think!"?
ChuckMcM 13y ago
It is all about markets, there is a huge market for selling an appliance which has 'Apps' which can entertain you, inform you, and help you remember stuff, there is a much much smaller market for selling a device you can program to do interesting things. Most (and by that imprecise measure I mean > 50% but less than 75%) of the people who own an Apple "computer" have no interest in programming anything. Nearly all iPad owners are not interested in writing iOS programs, and easily 99% of iPhone owners could care less about writing code for them. That's ok, but it means there continues to be opportunities to sell programmer's cool gear. The down side is that programmers can't always leverage the benefits on price that mass production brings for their tools.
scott_s 13y ago
I find it strange that some people see computers-as-appliances as an existential threat. (I'm thinking of things like tablets, smart phones and consoles.) Yes, it is difficult to tinker with the insides of such things. But we gain stability and ease of use. Such devices do not magically make other kinds of computers cease to exist. Computers that can be tinkered with still do exist, and it has never been easier to use them to program. Microsoft and Apple both provide free access to rich development environments. And it's easy to install many other kinds of programming environments onto such machines. In fact, the combination of a web browser and JavaScript is perhaps the most ubiquitous programming environment, ever. And it is available on damned near everything.
- wrongc0ntinent 13y ago
  In my experience, coding usually starts out for two main reasons: curiosity/fascination, and need. Over time, that ratio has changed, which I guess is the main gripe of the article.
nsxwolf 13y ago
To what end? Should people be writing their own email clients? I don't know many people who would modify or extend the software they use, even if it were really "easy" to do so. Also, I doubt such tasks could ever really be "easy", even if the arcane syntax of a C style language were not an obstacle. I'm not seeing the problem. Regular people were forced to use DOS and Windows machines in the early days, and they struggled with their complexity. Now we have a class of computers that regular people and technical people alike enjoy using. That's not a win?
- sedev 13y ago
  A toy project I did not too long ago was "keep an eye on my Twitter account and when I favorite a tweet that contains a YouTube URL, add that video to my Watch Later playlist in YouTube." Nearly every time I mention this to someone who uses both services, they want it (yes, I know Instapaper can de facto do this).
  - nsxwolf 13y ago
    Right. You're a software developer, and your friends saw what you did and want it, and you'll give it to them, and they'll be happier. They don't have the skills needed to do it themselves, aren't interested in acquiring the skills, but appreciate your end product and want to use it. I think this is just fine. I don't really want to put in the incredible effort required to learn to play the piano well, so I'm glad other people have put in that effort and I'll listen to them play instead. Would I learn if someone made it a lot easier? Probably. But would that make me a musician? Could I make inspired changes and extensions to existing works? Or wholly original works? No way!
- dpkendal 13y ago
  “Multics Emacs proved to be a great success — programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program.” — http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html You also assume that programmability implies complexity, which is the argument I tried to refute …
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drcube 13y ago
I dislike the distinction between using a computer and programming one. Both are just ways to tell a machine what to do. He tells his computer what to do using C, she tells her computer what to do using bash, and they tell their computer what to do using Word and Firefox. Certainly C, bash, Word and Firefox are all programs. So is an assembler and linker. I don't know if we should treat all applications like domain specific languages, or if we should just hide complexity until needed, then provide a way for more advanced users to access lower abstraction layers, or what. Either way, I don't think this fairly strict but artificial distinction between using and programming is helpful or beneficial.
talles 13y ago
This is an eternal discussion between ease of use VS flexibility. I think we have room for all of it. Oversimplifying things, as an example, I love how Linux is extremely flexible, Mac extremely easy and Windows... well, let's say it's in the middle. I believe sometimes someone got it 'more right' than others achieving a right on the spot balance. But that doesn't invalidate the other approaches. You got to dance accordingly to the music.
protomyth 13y ago
Taking Apple to task is pretty sad give OS X programming is basically NeXT's environment which was advertised as one of the easiest computers to program (see their Sun vs NeXT videos). Not to mention HyperCard which hit a nerve with a lot of people. If you want an actual example of WTF programming, do something you did in the 90's in Visual Basic on the web. The amount of infrastructure and types of things you need to know how to program is daunting. It is still easier to program an app on NeXTSTEP at the time of the webs creation than on the web today.
jere 13y ago
>They could make computers do everything for them... helping them select the best photo to show to potential dates. Hmm. What are those tweets about anyway: >Considering writing some software to use MTurk to rank my self-portraits. It's kind of funny that out of two examples given to demonstrate the utility of programming a computer, one is actually just asking people for their opinion.

43 points by dpkendal 13y ago

Programming is easy, after all: all you need to understand is conditions and repetition. If you believe that you have never tried to teach a class of non-programmers. Instead, programming keeps getting harder on new computers all the time, especially ones made by Apple Apple have made a lot of efforts to bring programming to the common user: Hypercard, Applescript, Automator. They are abandoned because no-one was interested in using them.

atmosx 13y ago
And no one is using them because simplification of any complex subject has limits. And when you pass those limits your tool, theory or conjuncture becomes either incomplete or obsolete. So the professionals avoid your tool spending their time on a worthy one (objective-c) and amateurs are too confused on how to use properly it anyway.
dpkendal 13y ago
“If you believe that you have never tried to teach a class of non-programmers.” No, you’re trying to teach them with the same kind of tool that I call ‘clumsy and unsophisticated’ in the article. “Apple have made a lot of efforts to bring programming to the common user: Hypercard, Applescript, Automator. They are abandoned because no-one was interested in using them.” In many ways HyperCard was still too difficult, but it was a great tool. Many people did use it to make simple programs, and some became programmers from it. I’m not arguing that everyone should learn to program to the level of being able to create and sell apps; HyperCard is a good example in that sense. AppleScript is a failure because it’s a terribly difficult language even for most working programmers. Its designers completely failed in that respect. Automator is not programming.
- antimagic 13y ago
  Yes, but you took Apple to task, singling them out as the worst offender, when this clearly isn't the case - Apple really have tried to make programming accessible to the masses. OK, so Automator failed, but at least they tried. When was the last time you installed a linux distribution that came with graphically-assisted scripting out of the box that was more polished than Automator? Oh, that's right, never. Also, your whole premise is just wrong. There's been a ton of research showing that the hard thing about programming is not syntax, or tooling, but thinking in abstract terms (I'd link, but I don't have access to most academic publications these days :( ). You're not the first person to think "Hey, if only we could make this whole programming thing more accessible to everyone, everyone would do it!" And yet nobody has succeeded, or even gone close. The best we've managed is to make it easier for an interested amateur to learn to program normally. We've got good documentation available on the Web. Every PC can easily install a wide range of language development environments, for free. Large numbers of frameworks are available to allow you to avoid having to do the heavy lifting for areas where you don't have the time / brainpower to become a subject matter expert. These are all positive developments, but the fact is that 99% of the population still can't even explain in plain English (or Spanish, or Chinese or whatever it is they speak) to a developer what it is they want a system to do. When was the last time you saw a spec written by a non-programmer trying to explain a business process? Did they even try to explain what happens in error cases? If they did you were a lucky sort, because I've seen dozens of these types of documents, and none contained information on how to handle error conditions. They'll tell you to pull an employee out of the database based on the name, without stopping to think that several employees might have the same name, so you need to have some unique identifier. They'll tell you that an action needs to be done on the first of the month, but they'll forget to tell you what to do when the first of the month is actually a public holiday. These are the problems that we, as programmers, are trained to deal with, and which most people just don't seem capable of doing. And "easy" tools aren't going to help them, because the problem isn't the tools, it's the abstract thinking.
- Double_Cast 13y ago
  > No, you’re trying to teach them with the same kind of tool that I call ‘clumsy and unsophisticated’ in the article. Despite the vitriol you've received, I think I understand what you're trying to say here. I think you want a higher level programming language. And not merely a successor to the latest zeitgeist, but essentially what C was to punch tape. That is, binary might be fundamental to computation, but it isn't fundamental to the ergonomics of programming. So the question is, is it possible to somehow abstract programming to an higher level? pg wrote that all other language have evolved towards lisp. I think the trend is a special case of a trend towards functional programming. So imho, whatever comes next (given there is a next) will have to (for lack of a better word, ) supersede lambda calculus.
  - dpkendal 13y ago
    You seem to be the only person in this thread who has grasped this idea; though instinctively to me it feels another formalism like LC is the wrong way to go.
    - Double_Cast 13y ago
      I'm new to programming, so I don't have much street cred. But I've heard others call LC "the assembly language of math"[1]. And I think functionals are really neat. So imho, I suspect LC's more than a formalism. But it drives me up the wall that it doesn't have an elegant subtraction analog. This leads me to believe there must be something better. The answer sure can't be the Apple thing you mentioned. I imagine it's a just a gui, a kludge. But if not LC, then what do you think? [1] http://matt.might.net/articles/compiling-up-to-lambda-calculus/ http://matt.might.net/articles/compiling-up-to-lambda-calcul...
- ericHosick 13y ago
  > Automator is not programming. Automator is not coding.
jjoonathan 13y ago
I wish I had more than one upvote to give, you hit it on the head. Apple of all companies has tried repeatedly (and failed repeatedly) to bring programming to the masses. It doesn't seem to matter if you format the task so that it looks like making a slideshow, pressing a record button / writing English prose, or moving + connecting blocks. Programming still requires that the programmer be able to break an abstract task into concrete chunks, and even though there was a plausible argument that Hypercard/Applescript/Automator might have made the task easier or more discoverable, it didn't turn out to be the case. I learned to code in AppleScript Studio, so I know what I'm talking about here: moving to C/ObjC felt like a breath of fresh air, not a hurdle. Syntax, pointers, and memory management were much easier to learn than the nuances of the strange restricted subset of English that was AppleScript. Before you learn to break things down, no analogy (or even record button) is going to help you write code. After you learn how to break things down, an expressive language + good documentation is simply the best tool for the job. Also, with XCode/Instruments downloadable for free, easier to use, and more powerful than ever, I think it's a bit silly to slam Apple for this one. There might be an argument for slamming Microsoft, but VS Express isn't that bad IMO. There is definitely an argument for slamming nix, but decentralized authority is inherently incompatible with the kind of reform that would make the nix desktop programming experience more palatable to newcomers and open source libraries are a boon for function discovery, so it's still a bit of a wash. Web development as a desktop platform has inarguably improved by leaps and bounds over the past few years. StackOverflow has dramatically smoothed the learning process for all of these. I'm pretty sure the long term trend is exactly the opposite of what OP said: getting started with programming has never been easier, and the people who make programming environments have been working tirelessly and trying everything in their power (even moonshots) to make the process easier and more newcomer-friendly. None of the moonshots worked but the more traditional efforts have paid off in spades.
moocowduckquack 13y ago
I have tried to explain how computers work to people who were determined not to understand it. Once I had ditched any mention of numbers or maths and described "the toilet paper game" where you get a marker pen and make marks on a roll of toilet paper, then I found they had no problems. Personally I reckon that you can teach programming to anyone who can learn a card game.

CmonDev 13y ago

Programming is as easy as painting: either your brain is wired correctly or you work hard to re-wire it.

aestra 13y ago

Programming is easy to the programmers. Art is easy to the artist. Writing is easy to the writer. Music is easy to the musician.

dpkendal 13y ago
I am a programmer, writer and musician, but I don’t find any of them easy. Programming is unique, though, because the tools you use to do it can also be used to make the task in general much easier.
- cust_support 13y ago
  Thank you Snowflake for pointing to yourself as an argument against an obvious fallacy. Too bad you also took the opportunity to post another one.
- aestra 13y ago
  Should have explained. Some people find some tasks come natural to them so they think they are inherently easy for everyone. while others find other tasks come naturally to them. Humans are different. Music is more or less impossible for me. I am sure programming is impossible for someone else. Math is logical and easy to me. I used to tutor my friends after school on the homework that was assigned thinking "how us this not not completely straightforward to you, this is simple." yet they thought things I couldn't grasp were simple. Lets not ignore differences in humans and say programming is easy because it isn't to a large number of people. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/is-it-true-that-not-everyone-can-be-a-programmer/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/is-it-...
- hsmyers 13y ago
  One of my favorite differences between my painting and my programming is that it is much easier to clean up my work space after programming---no brushes to clean :)

qznc 13y ago

I am torn on this. On the one hand, programming is empowering, so everybody should learn some programming in school. On the other hand, a powerful tool is also dangerous. Look at the financial sector using complex Excel sheets nobody understands anymore. As the world gets more and more dependent on software, we need more professionalism in software engineering.

fenollp 13y ago
Complex ¬= Powerful. Simple is Powerful. > we need more professionalism in software engineering. I completely agree. I think we need courses on The Mindset of Coding, teaching things like some of Bret Victor's principles, KISS, the UNIX philosophy, reverse engineering, …
- csmuk 13y ago
  This is the most sensible thing I've heard for years.
- Double_Cast 13y ago
  What does "powerful" even mean? Each time I open an article on HN describing the virtues of the latest programming language, I always see the word "powerful". Whether a language is Assembly or Python, the author can guarantee it's "powerful". I think it's devolved into a buzzword because programmers use it to mean opposite things. It's like how Orwell said two critics can describe the same painting as possessing both "a living quality" and "a peculiar deadliness" [1]. Like I said in another comment, programmers were able to abstract binary away from the tangibility of punch tape. But I think we can only abstract so much before we begin to hit a wall, beyond of which we begin to lose absolutely essential features. So once we reach such a point, I think complexity becomes conserved. So if we want to simplify one thing, the best we can often do is move the complexity elsewhere. Like a what a refrigerator does with heat. When programmers say a low level language like C is simple and powerful, they mean that the implementation is simple, but the interface is complex [2]. But when programmers say that a high level language like Python is simple and powerful, they mean that the implementation is complex, but the interface is simple. So I think the real question is, "Where is the complexity hiding?" [1] https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm [2] http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

deleted 13y ago

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dsego 13y ago

Oh my, if only apple wasn't around, folks would spend their days happily typing code in vim or emacs.

sp332 13y ago
Isn't that in the category of difficult things that aren't necessarily part of programming?
JasonFruit 13y ago
Honestly, I think there's some truth to that. If it weren't for the Macintosh, the WIMP approach to computing might never have become as dominant, and text-based systems might be more prevalent; I agree with the article's assertion that text-based programs are simpler to conceive and write.
- nsxwolf 13y ago
  No one ever believes this when it's said, but it's true. WYSIWYG took a long time to catch on. Wordperfect for DOS was still pretty popular in 1995. People just think it "makes sense" to work directly with various fonts and sizes when writing on a page, but that's actually pretty unnatural. No one ever worked that way before - you'd bang out a draft on a typewriter and hand it to a typesetter who would take care of that part. It took at least a decade for people to really accept it in earnest.

discreditable 13y ago

It's not that programming is extremely difficult, it's that many people are barely functional on a computer to begin with.

thyrsus 13y ago

I'd appreciate some examples of tools that make programming "easy". Easier than assembler? OK, check. Easy in general? I want that.

dpkendal 13y ago
Bret Victor is working on some amazing stuff right now. I suggest his talk Drawing Dynamic Visualizations to see how he’s making programing more direct and less “code”-ish: http://vimeo.com/66085662 http://vimeo.com/66085662
walshemj 13y ago
Editors and IDE's that do code high lighting make finding some types of bug much easier. I can recall the old days of printing out on fan fold paper and going through with a highlighter to debug a missing " or }

zwieback 13y ago

Horses for courses - I've been programming since the pre-GUI era and much as I love modern IDEs and advanced interfaces I still find text entry of traditional programming language code via keyboard incredibly expressive for many things.

alanctgardner2 13y ago

People seem to think the difficulty in coding is the mechanical act of writing code. "If only you could draw code!", they cry, linking together a series of blocks to represent program flow. The thing is, even if you make a language where it's impossible to fail (every program does something, it's visually intuitive when a program isn't valid), it still doesn't necessarily do the right thing. The difficulty in programming isn't the mechanical act of writing code; we have copy-paste for that. The problem is having a mental model of the program execution, and mapping it to the real-world problem. This is the difference between good and bad programmers, and it applies to the population at large. Case in point: I'm working with some soon-to-be grads from a CS program. In Java, one of them instantiated a class, and set an attribute of that instance. Elsewhere they instantiated a new instance, and tried to read the value back. And they couldn't understand why the value wasn't set, Portal-style, in their new instance. This guy, who has been in school for 4 years for CS, also couldn't figure out why it made sense to make specific shapes (circle, square, triangle) children of an abstract Shape class. He could, very easily, add a Search bar to an Android app because he had seen a tutorial on how to do it - but making the bar do anything was a tremendous feat, because it wasn't just the mechanical repetition of some pattern. Even with experienced (>5 years) programmers, I've seen some really terrible debugging where it was clear the person didn't have a mental model of the code. They never really got any benefit from GDB, because when they looked at the internal state of the program they just shrugged and said "Yeah, looks right". And they owned the codebase. This was their code, and they couldn't reason about it. After all that ranting, my point is: you can make it easier to write some program, but you can't make it (appreciably) easier to write the program that you need.

williamcotton 13y ago
> And they couldn't understand why the value wasn't set, Portal-style, in their new instance. Is it possible that these students might have other types of intelligence? I've got friends who are very strong visually and they thrive in visual environments such as MaxMSP and Quartz Composer. They make amazing interactive art pieces. Yet, they seem completely baffled by general purpose programming and symbolic logic. The thing is, you can talk to them and they can absolutely reason about things. They're not incapable of logic, rather a certain expression of logic. What worries me is that we've created a negative feedback loop. The tools we've created for computing are heavily dependent on symbolic logic. This attracts people who are gifted with symbolic logic. They in turn create more tools that work best for people excel at symbolic logic. And so on and so forth. I don't think this is an issue with people being incapable of creating mental models. A gymnast has an amazing mental model of their body and it's relation to space and the things in that space. However, we have yet to create computing tools for interactive design that build on top of that mental model. Why is that? Because we engineers have some of the WORST mental models of how our bodies flow through space. I think this is all mainly an issue with listening, understanding and compassion, traits that seem to be stunted in the software industry. Engineers seem to have a certain predilection to talk over people. We seem to always be waiting for the other person to stop talking. And I'll take the poetic license one step further and say that our entire industry is incapable of listening. It is always "hey, lets set up coding camps"! What about, "hey, let's set up a symposium where us engineers listen to other people about how they live their lives and what they think!"?

ChuckMcM 13y ago

It is all about markets, there is a huge market for selling an appliance which has 'Apps' which can entertain you, inform you, and help you remember stuff, there is a much much smaller market for selling a device you can program to do interesting things. Most (and by that imprecise measure I mean > 50% but less than 75%) of the people who own an Apple "computer" have no interest in programming anything. Nearly all iPad owners are not interested in writing iOS programs, and easily 99% of iPhone owners could care less about writing code for them. That's ok, but it means there continues to be opportunities to sell programmer's cool gear. The down side is that programmers can't always leverage the benefits on price that mass production brings for their tools.

scott_s 13y ago

I find it strange that some people see computers-as-appliances as an existential threat. (I'm thinking of things like tablets, smart phones and consoles.) Yes, it is difficult to tinker with the insides of such things. But we gain stability and ease of use. Such devices do not magically make other kinds of computers cease to exist. Computers that can be tinkered with still do exist, and it has never been easier to use them to program. Microsoft and Apple both provide free access to rich development environments. And it's easy to install many other kinds of programming environments onto such machines. In fact, the combination of a web browser and JavaScript is perhaps the most ubiquitous programming environment, ever. And it is available on damned near everything.

wrongc0ntinent 13y ago
In my experience, coding usually starts out for two main reasons: curiosity/fascination, and need. Over time, that ratio has changed, which I guess is the main gripe of the article.

nsxwolf 13y ago

To what end? Should people be writing their own email clients? I don't know many people who would modify or extend the software they use, even if it were really "easy" to do so. Also, I doubt such tasks could ever really be "easy", even if the arcane syntax of a C style language were not an obstacle. I'm not seeing the problem. Regular people were forced to use DOS and Windows machines in the early days, and they struggled with their complexity. Now we have a class of computers that regular people and technical people alike enjoy using. That's not a win?

sedev 13y ago
A toy project I did not too long ago was "keep an eye on my Twitter account and when I favorite a tweet that contains a YouTube URL, add that video to my Watch Later playlist in YouTube." Nearly every time I mention this to someone who uses both services, they want it (yes, I know Instapaper can de facto do this).
- nsxwolf 13y ago
  Right. You're a software developer, and your friends saw what you did and want it, and you'll give it to them, and they'll be happier. They don't have the skills needed to do it themselves, aren't interested in acquiring the skills, but appreciate your end product and want to use it. I think this is just fine. I don't really want to put in the incredible effort required to learn to play the piano well, so I'm glad other people have put in that effort and I'll listen to them play instead. Would I learn if someone made it a lot easier? Probably. But would that make me a musician? Could I make inspired changes and extensions to existing works? Or wholly original works? No way!
dpkendal 13y ago
“Multics Emacs proved to be a great success — programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program.” — http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html You also assume that programmability implies complexity, which is the argument I tried to refute …

deleted 13y ago

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drcube 13y ago

I dislike the distinction between using a computer and programming one. Both are just ways to tell a machine what to do. He tells his computer what to do using C, she tells her computer what to do using bash, and they tell their computer what to do using Word and Firefox. Certainly C, bash, Word and Firefox are all programs. So is an assembler and linker. I don't know if we should treat all applications like domain specific languages, or if we should just hide complexity until needed, then provide a way for more advanced users to access lower abstraction layers, or what. Either way, I don't think this fairly strict but artificial distinction between using and programming is helpful or beneficial.

talles 13y ago

This is an eternal discussion between ease of use VS flexibility. I think we have room for all of it. Oversimplifying things, as an example, I love how Linux is extremely flexible, Mac extremely easy and Windows... well, let's say it's in the middle. I believe sometimes someone got it 'more right' than others achieving a right on the spot balance. But that doesn't invalidate the other approaches. You got to dance accordingly to the music.

protomyth 13y ago

Taking Apple to task is pretty sad give OS X programming is basically NeXT's environment which was advertised as one of the easiest computers to program (see their Sun vs NeXT videos). Not to mention HyperCard which hit a nerve with a lot of people. If you want an actual example of WTF programming, do something you did in the 90's in Visual Basic on the web. The amount of infrastructure and types of things you need to know how to program is daunting. It is still easier to program an app on NeXTSTEP at the time of the webs creation than on the web today.

jere 13y ago

>They could make computers do everything for them... helping them select the best photo to show to potential dates. Hmm. What are those tweets about anyway: >Considering writing some software to use MTurk to rank my self-portraits. It's kind of funny that out of two examples given to demonstrate the utility of programming a computer, one is actually just asking people for their opinion.