Man who celebrates the invention of the wheel laments that people won’t reinvent the wheel
Sixty years ago as this article was published in 2014
Name all the bones in your body
Surprisingly they’re all named “Mike”
Even the ones named Jeff?
Those are lying, they’re all Mikes
Except Jeff, everybody knows Jeff is Jeff and not Mike, but he does seem like a Mike type, so everyone just call them Mike.
The Tandy (i.e. Radio Shack) TRS80 was affectionately known back then as the Trash 80. My first experience at programming was in high school in 1971 or 72 on a paper-roll teletype style terminal, that was connected to a PDP-11 at OMSI (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry). It wasn’t even a class, just an after-school activity run by our math teacher, Mr. Tuhy. My masterpiece was a tic-tac-toe program that could always win if it went first, and always at least tie if the human went first. I accidentally deleted it lol.
I accidentally deleted it lol.
Sounds like it did not win nor tie at the end.
It made a bold move, Cotton.
Why should they? Less users are programming anything, but more people have become users of computers in the first place. And we have more users of computers, precisely because the levels of abstraction do not require the ordinary user to program anything. Today’s ordinary user is more “ordinary” than fifty years ago. This development of making a tool or subject more accessible to the layman, by hiding the complexities with abstractions and yet allowing more skilled users to gain advantages by peeling away the abstractions, is present in many different fields throughout the history of mankind.
If you look closely, it is not really surprising. Not even a problem at all. In fact, if you have the simple understanding that maybe somebody doesn’t want to program, not because they are a stupid idiot or a lazy normie consumer, but because they simply don’t give a shit about it, follow other interests and can contribute to the world with other skills, then the observation that most users are not programming anything, is insanely unproblematic.
To be fair, we are at a point where most users will never need to program anything as most needs are already met by existing work. The whole “there’s an app for that” marketing had a lot of truth to it.
Also most student-age people today who would have become programmers 20 years ago probably won’t, because AI will be generating most code. The definition of “programming” will change to writing and tweaking effective specs for AI to generate code from. Back in the 80s and 90s I liked to say our ultimate goal as programmers was to eliminate our own jobs. Well I’ll be darned…
50 years ago people thought everyone would be able to program using BASIC, now you think everyone will be able to program using AI. It seems nothing has changed in 50 years.
Well, reading comprehension hasn’t changed. I said “most” not “everyone”. Amazingly the world isn’t binary.
because AI will be generating most code.
What’s funny is AI is learning from developer code to write code. If it runs out of this dataset it has to eat it’s own output. This is a recipe for disaster.
Software dev myself (retired) and I’ve been very skeptical about AI generated code, but a friend of mine uses it daily in his work. During one of our in-person D&D games he told it to create a SQL Lite app to keep track of some game info, and in seconds he was using the app. AI is currently a super-emotional issue riddled with misinformation and fantasy, but there’s no denying its usefulness.
Terrible take.
It will only get worse with the phone and tablet generation and LLMs.
Programming is alien. It’s fundamentally hard to comprehend, because the computer will do exactly what you tell it to, regardless of what you mean. You have to think for the both of you.
I’m not sure I agree. I think most people can understand recipes or instruction lists and totally could program, if they wanted to and had to. They just don’t want to and usually don’t have to. They find it boring, tedious and it’s also increasingly inaccessible (e.g. JavaScript tooling is the classic example).
But I think mainly people just don’t find it interesting. To understand this, think about law. You absolutely have the intellect to be a lawyer (you clever clog), so why aren’t you? For me, it’s mind-numbingly boring. If I was really into law and enjoyed decoding their unnecessarily obtuse language then I totally would be a lawyer. But I don’t.
There was a very noticeable drop off in people at my university computer science program after the first programming class. There is an actual wall there for a lot of people in terms of comprehending how programming works, things like assigning a value to a variable where difficult concepts to some.
I dunno about this; IME even when it was highly approachable most people didn’t do it. I was around back then, got my first Commodore in '84, and even the Geek / Nerd circles were mostly just for people swapping copies of commercial software. It wasn’t any better when I graduated High School in '91 and even in College almost no one outside of STEM was doing any programming.
It wasn’t and still isn’t a popular activity.
140 years after the automobile, most drivers can’t or won’t repair their car!
140 years after the automobile, most drivers can’t or won’t design and produce new automobile products.
Isn’t that a closer analogy?
Car user manuals used to tell you how to refill the battery. Now they tell you not to drink what’s in the battery.
FATHER, I CRAVE THE FORBIDDEN JUICE
That’s because we don’t need to fill our battery anymore. The warning is because of those older folks who did sip the battery acid.
Nah, it’s because they can change you for the battery, but you could sue them for drinking the juice.
College computer science courses have had to go back to teaching students what computer files and folders are. A lot of computer programs have simplified themselves as ease of use overtook features as a driving factor for use.
Most people don’t know how to program because they don’t know the basics of computing.
Nonsense. There are way more programmers now than there were in the Windows 3.1/9x era when you couldn’t avoid files and folders. Ok more people are exposed to computers in general, but still… Anyone who has the interest to learn isn’t going to be stopped by not knowing what file and folders are.
It’s like saying people don’t become car mechanics because you don’t have to hand crank your engine any more.
It’s like saying people don’t become car mechanics because you don’t have to hand crank your engine any more.
I look at it more as most people don’t need to know how to do basic car maintenance because cars and the systems surrounding cars are designed to where you don’t need to know how to do basic car maintenance to drive a car.
People can learn to program, but the vast majority don’t have to know the basics of how a computer works to use one. Because of that, the vast majority of users aren’t going to have the drive to learn to program.
Right but it isn’t “the basics of how a computer works” that drives people to learn programming is it?
Nobody says “aha, now that I know what Giles and folders are I will become a programmer”.
People become programmers for other reasons:
- They want to make something (e.g. a game).
- They are naturally interested in computers.
- Money.
No, but you need to know the basics of how a computer works to program. And if you are interested in computers, you are going to learn how they work.
I see this as an accessibility problem, computers have incredible power but taking advantage of it requires a very specific way of thinking and the drive to push through adversity (the computer constantly and correctly telling you “you’re doing it wrong”) that a lot of people can’t or don’t want to do. I don’t think they’re wrong or lazy to feel that way, and it’s a barrier to entry just like a set of stairs is to a wheelchair user.
The question is what to do about it, and there’s so much we as an industry should be doing before we even start to think about getting “normies” writing code or automating their phones. Using a computer sucks ass in so many ways for regular people, you buy something cheap and it’s slow as hell, it’s crapped up with adware and spyware out of the box, scammers are everywhere ready to cheat you out of your money… anyone here is likely immune to all that or knows how to navigate it but most people are just muddling by.
If we got past all that, I think it’d be a question of meeting users where they are. I have a car but I couldn’t replace the brakes, nor do I want to learn or try to learn, but that’s okay. My car is as accessible as I want it to be, and the parts that aren’t accessible, I go another route (bring it to a mechanic who can do the things I can’t). We can do this with computers too, make things easy for regular people but don’t try to make them all master programmers or tell them they aren’t “really” using it unless they’re coding. Bring the barrier down as low is it can go but don’t expect everyone to be trying to jump over it all the time, because they likely care about other things more.
When I was a kid in the 90s I had a PC that came with Windows 3.1 and it had QBasic. I messed around with it a lot. I spent a lot of time reading the built-in documentation.
I remember making a random password generator, a text-based blackjack game, and some “screensavers” that were basically just drawing a bunch of stuff on the screen and then scrolling it off the top by printing blank lines.
It took quite a bit of time to do that pretty basic stuff, so it’s really not a surprise to me that most people aren’t making computer programs today. Most of anything an average person could hope to program has already been done and made available for free.
I did basically all those things, or very similar things, in TI-BASIC back in high school. I didn’t care that they had already been done countless times; I had a blast figuring out how to make them work.
I dearly wish more people would try making basic programs that are 100% their own creation, even if it’s some random string generator. It’s more rewarding than they might think!
Same here. I missed the lecture of many math classes figuring out basic on my ti84+. I mostly wrote simple games. The calculator made it easy to experiment since all the functionality could be found in menus or a button somewhere.
Yep, same! It’s probably a good thing that I didn’t know the first thing about Z80 assembly or I’d have flunked hard 😂 I would have loved to make my own clone of Phoenix!
I only used BASIC to open infinite windows to crash Windows 95.
I can only think of one example where some simple programming skills could benefit ordinary users: Home Automation. All the more difficult stuff is already neatly packaged into ready to use modules, and the user doesn’t have to worry about the ZigBee protocol or APIs or network ports to turn on a light bulb. Here some knowledge about conditionals, variables, loops can easily be used to program useful automations.
