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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Ironically, I sometimes fear Apple would be the harbinger of programming's death, what with how much can be done via consumer-friendly app and touch-screens. It didn't help hearing about OSX becoming macOS, which would be well in line with a dystopian future in which the only people who need to know about plaintext and file systems are the full-time Apple programmers.

But this sounds like a great initiative...and also, one that seems to be nearly all upside for Apple. Great PR, good benefit to society, increased buzz at the brick and mortar stores, and the cost of running these camps seem like it would be more than paid for by kids who are not only buying the programmable peripherals (anyone have experience hacking the Sphero?), but Apple products for all of their coding lives.

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Can you expand on why you thought the OSX -> macOS change would lead to anything in particular like that? I don't really understand how.

Sorry, I don't have much reasoning on the specifics of OSX to macOS as they've been recently revealed, just the general skepticism that one operating system could achieve the best of both systems...in the same way that Windows 8.1, in my limited usage, was a fairly compromised experience. But I'm saying that as someone who can't imagine how skilled engineering could satisfactory thread the needle...and I'm giving short shrift to the potential greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts experience of a combined touch-and-desktop experience that perhaps a later iteration of Surface Book will achieve.

Mostly I'm bitter that not only can I not memeorize any of the 3+ finger gestures on iOS, I don't even know how customize/deactivate them, and I have a sneaking suspicion that more such touch magic will be part of the desktop experience.

I don't think macOS is targeting touch screens -- and it's not a combination of OSX and iOS. It's simply a renaming of the OSX system.

I don't disagree...such an evolution would be too drastic and unnecessary given the desktop and iPad Pro ecosystem...but to presume that Apple might someday make macOS and iOS intertwined doesn't require a drastic reading between the lines:

- the top feature in the Apple macOS preview is the porting of an exclusive iOS feature (Siri)

- there weren't any huge new features in Yosemite, though the top billed feature is split screen, which was subsequently introduced to iOS9. You can notch that as a victory for the Desktop-worldview...but the other big feature I remember in Yosemite was bringing over Metal, which was introduced in iOS 8.

- for Mavericks, which had many more changes, the two top What's New features are iBooks and Maps...two iOS apps that do not particularly change up the Desktop experience.

- Other developers might disagree with me, but while I've been mostly happy as a developer on OSX, I can't recall the last time Apple added something that hugely changed my experience as a developer...Bash on 10.11.5 is still the same Bash as on 2007...almost a decade ago. The freeing of the Office apps was very nice, though I don't use them so can't say how well they've been maintained. I do know that iTunes and iPhoto continue to be a disruptive shitshow, and nearly every app that I use on a daily basis, from Chrome, to Dropbox, to Google Chrome, to Steam and Atom...are third-party.

For fucks sake, one of the small things that would bring me daily happiness is a built in version of flux. But not only did Apple steal flux's thunder by blocking the iOS flux app and then adding Night Shift, they still haven't added it to OS X, which is where flux originated...and I don't see it as part of macOS.

- And then there's the hardware. I don't pay enough attention to PCs to know whether Appple is still outpacing them, but the rate and quality of new first-party peripheral does not feel like Apple is pushing hard on this front. I love the trackpads (a feature that has followed innovation on iOS), but I want a mouse, and the Apple first-party mice are terrible. I do love my several-years old aluminum keyboard...but the new one didn't seem to be a worthwhile improvement for the price jump.

- and of course, there's the Apple Display situation. No other Apple product would more greatly improve my computing experience and I am more than happy to pay the premium...the amount of time and money I've wasted in researching and buying third-party monitors that for whatever reason, aren't as seamless as the 5 year old Thunderbolt display, had more than exceeded the Apple premium sticker price.

- the iOS App Store has its problems...but the Mac App Store does not feel like an ecosystem that Apple has put nearly as much effort in helping out developers (or consumers)

- the iPad Pro is marketed as "your next computer"

Oops, meant that to be a simple list and not a rant. But typing it out on my iPad was slow enough that I kept thinking of other signs of non-desktop-enthusiasm for Apple :)...you can argue that Apple isn't overtly hampering the desktop...but it's hard to argue that Apple sees as much potential from desktop, based on its recent product releases.

Specifically because iOS TEN is coming out, so they have to get rid of OS TEN

They've renamed OS X to macOS. That's it.

Always read past the headline before getting upset.

I did read past the headline. My impression is that OSX as I know it will largely be the same in the first iteration of macOS, but the big consumer-facing changes are things that integrate the experience of my iOS device with my desktop, such as Siri and copy-and-paste. In terms of technical achievement, obviously the new file system seems to be the biggest change, but I don't see anything that will drastically impact what I do day to day (which is fine with me of course). Going off of Apple's own preview page [0], it's very hard to shake off the impression that what Apple thinks is most exciting about Sierra is that it brings over iOS's most signature features...and the most prominent of those, Siri, is a bit far on the other side of the spectrum from the typical Desktop dev tool.

I don't have a problem with these iOS features being brought over...I like all of these features even if I don't use them often on my phone or iPad. My problem has been the relative dearth of features that are desktop focused...the improvements haven't been bad, but they haven't signalled a desire on Apple's part to overhaul the desktop experience the way that Microsoft has with Windows.

But you can disagree with my assessment, maybe you think OSX is nearly perfect as is (personally, I love it, but that's as a developer), or that the changes since 10.6 have been as significant as Windows 7 to 8 to 10.

But I find it ironic that you accuse me of being too simple-minded to read past a headline when you've apparently already forgotten the public proclamations of Apple officials that the iPad Pro can be a desktop replacement. For fucks sake it's in the iPad Pro's product page right now:

> iPad Pro is more than the next generation of iPad — it’s an uncompromising vision of personal computing for the modern world. It puts incredible power that leaps past most portable PCs at your fingertips. It makes even complex work as natural as touching, swiping, or writing with a pencil...See how iPad Pro can be your next computer

Sure, push it off as fancy marketing talk if you want. I almost felt the same way when they sad the iPhone would replace the camera, despite far more in pro camera equipment than I have spent on computers in my lifetime...and Apple has been right on the ball on that. The full-size camera has its uses, but for all intents and purposes when it comes to photos produced and ecosystems affected, the iPhone (and Android) own the way we take images.

Why the hell should we think that convergence of desktop and mobile device won't and/or shouldn't happen? Microsoft Surface is already very impressive. iPad Pro does decent despite lacking desktop applications. Moreover, looking at past quarterly reports, there is no reason to think the desktop ebb will reverse.

I never said that I thought this iteration of macOS is the turning point...I only meant that if Apple intends to consolidate, the the branding and feature set of macOS is a logical iteration toward that goal. Consolidating the best of iOS and the best of OSX makes good business sense, but convergence will always have a few drawbacks for the edge case users. But don't take me as a total hater of change...my photography experience and experience has been made mostly obsolete by the ubiquitous of high quality cameras in the form of smartphones, but the fact that so many more people can capture and share beautiful memories (and important events) at a scale unthinkable in the pro-DSLR days, far outweighs what monetary damage had been done to the pro photography sector.

[0] http://www.apple.com/macos/sierra-preview/

> dystopian future in which the only people who need to know about plaintext and file systems are the full-time Apple programmers

We're heading into a dystopian future where the only people who need to know about manual transmission and fuel injectors are auto mechanics.

There are plenty of non technical people who benefit from increased abstraction. I'm personally happy as long as it doesn't impact productivity for power users.

>> dystopian future in which the only people who need to know about plaintext and file systems are the full-time Apple programmers

> We're heading into a dystopian future where the only people who need to know about manual transmission and fuel injectors are auto mechanics.

To be fair, "auto mechanics" is a wider class than "Ford technicians".

I think the invention of the GUI killed the dream of mainstream programming.

If computers had to be interacted with in ways that resembled programming - like a UNIX prompt - then people would be more used to the way computers actually work, with functions and parameters instead of icons and settings menus.

I really hope that raspberry PI gets more mainstream appeal as time goes on. I fear the separation between coders and users is creating parallel worlds of echo-chamber wizards and ignorant commoners.

I believe as you do and in basically the same terms, but, having had forms of this discussion for much of my life, I've encountered a counterargument that I thought I'd bring up as a devil's advocate:

> the way computers actually work, with functions and parameters instead of icons and settings menus

Isn't "the way computers actually work" at a fundamental level about electrical engineering, or at least about machine instructions? If you're using Unix commands, hasn't a whole lot of work already been done to create the abstractions of pipes, file descriptors, files, filesystems, and so on? Is it clear that there is some sense in which these abstractions are faithful and true to the machine and technology, where other software abstractions are not?

I got a ton of upvotes on this, but nobody has replied to it! I wonder how many people who upvoted me noticed that I claimed to be expressing an argument against my own opinion. :-)

I noticed, but I'm sort of mystified about why you wouldn't agree with that opinion. Clearly the command line is an order of magnitude more abstract than practical electrical engineering.

We need different people to understand different layers, and as long as there are enough people paying attention to each layer, there's no problem.

> Isn't "the way computers actually work" at a fundamental level about electrical engineering, or at least about machine instructions?

I agree, which is why sometimes I think perhaps a toy assembly language might be a neat experiment from a pedagogical point of view.

Without a GUI, mainstream computing probably wouldn't even exist let alone mainstream programming.

> Without a GUI, mainstream computing probably wouldn't even exist let alone mainstream programming.

As a child growing up, learning to function in society by speaking, reading, writing, and generally understanding English was a much harder task for me than learning to program in BASIC. BASIC is simple, predictable, logical and downright easy compared to English.

We take learning to read and write for granted, but its a messy, difficult, and often illogical affair. We have such high literacy rates because we start kids on it so young, and because its everywhere.

Its easy to imagine a version of our world in which children learn to interact with computers without GUIs, if CLIs were the norm. Children would learn them faster than adults.

Consider those children for whom learning a CLI was prerequisite to playing video games. All of those kids who I knew quickly memorized the requisite commands.

> Its easy to imagine a version of our world in which children learn to interact with computers without GUIs, if CLIs were the norm. Children would learn them faster than adults.

Do you want those children to hate CLIs because they are boring and they have to learn it just like all other boring stuff such learning how to read and write? If we offer children a way to enjoy what they are doing (i.e. make it fun to use/learn it), they will look forward to learning how to program. And making a task harder while it could be easier is not the answer (and children are not stupid, they would realize that a GUI would also be possible these days).

Furthermore, CLIs are hard to use in many environments. Would you want your waitress type "start paying; add product NAME [QUNANTIY]" instead of just touching the symbol a few times? There are many advantages with CLIs, especially when doing "traditional computing tasks" but in the real world, which is becoming much more digital, CLIs are not useable and a touchscreen with buttons is quicker. So why should the general public know how to use them – there are outside of our "edge cases" not really useful.

I'm responding to the claim that GUIs were probably necessary for coding to become commonplace. They were absolutely not necessary, though they certainly accelerated it.

In this context, most of your post seems unrelated to mine.

My argument is that without GUIs, computers would have either never become common or would gain adoption at a substantially slower pace than they have with the general public. With no/slowed adoption of computers, it's not possible for programming to become more common than it is today.

We are likely to use words like "common" and "substantially slower" somewhat differently, given the subjectivity of the terms. However:

> With no/slowed adoption of computers, it's not possible for programming to become more common than it is today.

"Not possible"? That's false on the face of it. You appear to be making unwarranted assumptions about what is possible in the relationship between (a) the amount of 'computing' in today's world and (b) the number of people who program.

The only non-cultural factor which really limits the possibility of coding is the availability of machines on which to program. I believe there were only around 20 million devs worldwide at the beginning of 2014. More PCs were shipped in the mid 80s in the US alone.

It is absolutely possible that a world in which the GUI was never invented could have more coders coding than a world in which the GUI had been invented. And the reverse is also true, of course.

> Consider those children for whom learning a CLI was prerequisite to playing video games. All of those kids who I knew quickly memorized the requisite commands.

Ah yes, I still figuratively remember all the commands for loading Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64 games, and their "FastLoad" variants, typing in those PEEKs and POKEs from magazines for cheating/hacking, then the fiddling with AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS while trying to juggle HIMEM and EMM386 and whatnot to be able to play DOS games..

It definitely piqued my interest in the workings of computers, spurred on by the generally more technically-inclined (not to mention humorous! oh how I miss CRASH and ZZAP!) magazines of the time, and it did get me into programming.

BUT, all that CLI voodoo was just a routine ritual to my other friends, in the way of what they really wanted (games.) They just had all the commands written down, and would rather ask someone than consult a manual when something needed to be done differently. They already had other interests. It didn't make all of them programmers.

So as with everything else, you can't really make a general statement that "X will make children do Y." People who are inclined towards doing something, will do that thing, on their own. I think what we (the adults) should focus on, is making things easier for them after the fact, after they've decided to get into programming.

Let's start with why the major operating systems of today require separate downloads and online research to get started with programming. macOS comes with that Grapher app, Windows comes with Paint, why can't they come with a nice coding app and some tutorials? So kids can just start poking away on their $500+ tablets and computers out of the box, like we used to on the C64, 20 years ago?

Could you elaborate on why the GUI killed the possibility of mainstream programming? I'm not exactly sure if the concept of what programming is (in an abstract sense) should be bound to the idea of a CLI.

In my opinion the use of a GUI vs CLI is more of a preference and doesn't explicitly assume the user is ignorant.

> I fear the separation between coders and users is creating parallel worlds of echo-chamber wizards and ignorant commoners.

Isn't that how a society works? The vast number of diverse human activities are only possible because of the echo-camber, of people who specialise in one area while remaining ignorant in almost all the others.

Also computing, and programming, is much much more than a unix prompt.

> If computers had to be interacted with in ways that resembled programming - like a UNIX prompt - then people would be more used to the way computers actually work, with functions and parameters instead of icons and settings menus.

Yes. That's exactly how it would be, for whatever small fraction of current computer users were able and willing to adapt to that paradigm.

You're absolutely right about the separation between people who understand how computers work and people who only use them. Your second sentence in this comment is a brilliant example of the "echo-chamber wizard" school.

This seems like a really elitist attitude. I like windows and buttons and menus. I also really like the command line, my development environment is a fullscreen terminal window.

Programming nowadays is easier than ever to get into. All you need is a computer, an internet connection, and the drive to learn.

If you bought a car in the early 20th century, you had to know how to work on it. Now, that's not that case.

GUIs allow things to be done by people who otherwise would not be interacting with a computer. They are huge enablers! This is true of the arts with computer graphics, music software. Granted really advanced users of computer graphics packages often end up doing some kind of programming via Python scripting or even Action Script back in the days of Flash. However there are plenty of people that are pure artists and just digitally paint of sculpt.

What kind of weird dream is that? Do people also have dreams about mainstream odontology or mainstream plumbing? WTF is wrong with the programmes that they want to turn entire population into lookalikies?

Why do people think that having programming skills is something that people of the future need? It's useless for most of people, and for many people who know how to program, is also useless for them too, as most if not all their needs are already fulfilled by someone else.

I think it's more important for the younger generation to learn about other things, some of them I do not know.

Things like agriculture, law, music theory, etc. are much more important than programming.

That's a pretty limited way of thinking about programming, which is basically the capability to translate intent to an autonomous, tireless machine.

I don't think the GUI has anything to do with it.

> If computers had to be interacted with in ways that resembled programming - like a UNIX prompt

Maybe programming should start resembling GUIs more, instead of the GUI resembling programming more?

The only reason I got into programming was by messing around with HyperCard as a kid. HyperCard had an excellent learning curve. You could just use the pre-built stacks (stuff like an address book). Then you could start editing the controls (adding a field to the address book), then start using the prefab button generator or copying pre-coded buttons from sample stacks (say, to add a button to go to your own card in the address book). Then start hacking away at the scripts in the buttons (scripts that resembled english better than any language I've seen since). And this thing came with every Mac.

Today, you have to decide "I want to learn to program", look up resources, maybe do a tutorial. The only thing we have today that's close to "tricking" people into programming without them deciding to start programming is Excel spreadsheets. That's probably the #1 programming environment today.

Not everyone likes the UNIX prompt.

Some of us rather enjoy the way Xerox PARC envision the future of computing.

On that vision IDEs and REPLs like the Swift Playground are the way it should be, no need for a UNIX prompt.

Of course there are upsides for Apple. Otherwise they couldn't do it (even if Tim wanted it, the stakeholders have the final saying). But I'm not really worried about that a lot. Sure, people will learn how great it is to program with Apple, and how easy you can do certain things in the playground sandbox (that's where you will code on your iPad. You give the program simple instructions such as move or draw an object in Swift but the heavy lifting is done by Apple's GUI Frameworks).

But as the kids grow older (and hopefully become more interested in programing), they will also learn the limitations of the playground. And this is where they will start looking in other alternatives. They might explore proper iOS development but at some point, but eventually they will have to deal with other platforms or programing languages. Some will probably stick to iOS, and the soon-to-be programers will prefer iOS because they have more knowledge in iOS programming but in general, there will be more programers for all languages.

I started programing about 6 or 7 years ago when I was 12 or 13. When I first started programing, I loved the PHP IDE I was using on my first windows laptop – it was so helpful and offered so many helpful functions and I was soon locked into it. At that time, I couldn't think about using another editor or os. But as I grew more passionate about programming (and started to see the limitations of PHP), I started using other languages, and I had to explore other editors. Long story short, right know, I'm mostly using VIM (although I would not call myself an VIM export – I just loving using it and because it is so quick, lightweight, modular and works everywhere). I prefer developing on Mac but last month I used Linux (Fedora) for over a month and enjoyed it. There was nothing I couldn't do on Fedora but I'm glad to be back on macOS again (I just prefer the platform as a whole and their integration with my other devices).

What I'm saying is that it doesn't really matter if you are locked into one language as long as you you are curious about things (which children generally are). You will soon discover that there are many things that are sometimes greater or just fun to use. Those things will not go away. I don't see many Swift webservers anytime soon and there will always be a need to use other languages. At some point, those kid will realize that their iPad is not sufficient and will switch to a PC. This path is certain better then scare kids away especially because many kids need immediate feedback when they type something (and "hello world" on a console won't cut it).

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