Is Apple destroying a generation of tech whizzes? | Hacker News Reader

Is Apple destroying a generation of tech whizzes?

economist.com

33 pointscwan43 comments

Here's my take. When I was a kid, yes I had the Apple II, I had HeathKit radio kits, etc. And yes we now have iPhone, iPad, etc. But folks those all have SDK's. And Linux exists now. Arduino. Mindstorms. Roomba. All kinds of electronic and computer kits for experimentation. Make magazine. Mainstream bookstores now actually have lots of geeky computer magazines and books on the shelves. And the Internet: tons of free software and documentation, all at your fingertips -- all of this quite unlike the 70's/early-80's.

So no, I don't think somehow the iPad is part of some new Dark Age. If anything, we live in a Golden Age for hackers. More so now than back then, taking into account what I cited above.

The iPhone and iPad are not the machines that ship with an SDK, though. That lies entirely on the Mac. And yeah, the Mac is definitely part of the hacker's Golden Age.

Good point. About Mac, agreed, especially software-wise. Hardware-wise, it may not be as hackable as the Apple II was, but it comes with way more powerful and interesting and useful software.

I read another piece on the iPad yesterday on a prominent German newspaper. I'm in line with you. My opinion yesterday was that the paper could be a little biased or in hope to get their market share back. A masses-loved closed device might be ideal for that.

They'll just do something else. I think it's a mistake to assume that if kids aren't exposed to what we were exposed to as kids then they won't learn anything. I could see kids writing iPhone apps to impress their friends these days. I know I'd be impressed if my kid did something equivalent to that when she's that age.

I probably would have when I was 16 or 17 just for that reason-let alone the fact that it's cool.

I think the single device which got most people into programming in my generation was the Nintendo Entertainment System, and I do not remember it as being a playground of hackability. It just showed six year olds that if you ate your carrots and studied math you would eventually be able to do magic.

In my opinion the Commodore/Amiga and later the PC computers created a lot more programmers than the Nintendo Entertainment System did. The North European game industry (DICE, Starbreeze, Remedy, etc.) was more or less based on the demoscene i.e. hacking for fun, not math education. Sure, the NES inspired a lot of people. But the real questions is: What if the NES would have been hackable?

Actually, it might give students a real incentive to tinker: "hey, you might make thousands of dollars on the App Store". Parents? Spend $100 for a curious kid's birthday to get a dev kit, it would be a great investment. Especially if it takes away from time they'd spend doing passive things like watching TV.

Back in 1985, I remember bugging my Mom to get me the Radio Shack Assembler for the Color Computer and a book on Assembly language programming and I wouldn't be surprised if she spent around $60 or so back then. Using this calculator ( http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/ ) that works out to between $100 to $200 in 2009 dollars (depending upon which inflation scale is used).

The iPad isn't going to destroy tinkering. The whole "oh no one will tinker and no one will want to be a software engineer" complaint is getting old. If closed platforms abound, tinkerers will create an open and adaptable one. There is a wealth of tools and systems available to tinkerers today. Widespread adoption of the iPad is not going to change that. iPads aren't going to destroy the hobbyist electronics market. And as for the software development - what's stopping someone from providing a good programming experience that is web based? (surely someone has to be building a web based IDE, say, that compiles from whatever language to javascript?)

280atlas.com

I've always believed the biggest single moment of destruction of future programmers is when Microsoft stopped shipping BASIC (plus the full source code of the games GORILLA.BAS and NIBBLES.BAS) with DOS/Windows.

I loved Gorillas. But Windows ships with .NET, including a C# and VB.Net compiler. I'd rather have hacked on that than BASIC, nostalgia value notwithstanding.

Now yes - as I much prefer Ruby, C++ and a wee bit of Haskell these days. But to learn? Absolutely not. The beauty of BASIC was that everything was simple enough that a 10 year old kid could comprehend it: type in instructions, and run them. No compilers, no CLR, no API calls. All of those things make the barrier to entry too high.

I started out writing things like:

  10 PRINT "Jason"
  20 GOTO 10

The reason why that's so important is that it can be comprehended, and it provides a base to which more knowledge can be added in very small pieces. Once the hypothetical 10-year-old has grasped the above - and there are a few fundamental concepts to grasp in there, they can start adding to that. Say:

  10 FOR I = 1 TO 10
  20 PRINT "Jason"
  30 NEXT

And from there, it's just a matter of learning more and more until you're dealing with abstract syntax trees, NP-hard problems, functional languages, multi-threaded programming and whatever else we get to deal with.

But if that first step is too high, many people will never be able to climb it.

That's true, but these days most people have always-on broadband internet connections, so prebundling with windows is not as important as it once was.

I don't think something like Processing is any harder to get into than basic was. I started programming with GW-BASIC, LOGO and QBasic myself - the first thing that I thought when I started playing around with Processing is that it is remarkably similar to a modern QBasic.

Absolutely. I tried teaching Python to teenagers. It turns out that significant whitespace is a hurdle. I would use QBasic if I had to do it again.

That's exactly how I learned to program.

As far as I know, Windows does not ship with the C# or VB.NET compiler. Both are, however, freely available as part of various downloadable SDKs and their respective Visual Studio Express SKUs.

This is honestly one of the most poorly-written 'articles' I've ever read: "The process of simplification of consumer goods in response to demand is what has delivered the enormous productivity gains that generate much of the wealth of modern life."

What does that even mean? How about this: "Think about light switches, for example. Homebuilders, these days, put all the wiring inside the walls where you can't see it, and power is generated miles away from sources. Most people couldn't generate a current if their life depended on it; they just know that if you flick the switch the light turns on and if it doesn't you change the bulb or check the circuit breaker (the equivalent of hitting restart) before calling in the experts."

I know that dumbing ideas down to the point of meaninglessness is sorta the status quo of mainstream journalism, but at least have a little respect for your readers...

It's naive to think these kids will commit themselves into any one device. Maybe they'll have a tablet but they'll also have access to a desktop or laptop, probably a gaming console and a SmartPhone too. Of course they'll also have nearly constant access to the Internet which is more than most of us had at that age and we turned out just fine.

While I generally enjoy a Cory Doctorow opinion I can't help but to think he is off on this one. The iPad is analogous to a newspaper, both used for consuming content and both gated from seeing how they work on the inside. The Apple IIgs' of today are Arduino's, FPGAs, and the like. Mostly or fully open source and customizable.

I initially thought the same thing, but then I realized that the iPad may actually inspire more kids to become hackers and programmers.

They may start with the iPad because it's the number one tablet but that doesn't mean they will stay with the iPad.

Future hackers will probably be inspired by the iPad and want to figure out how it works and how to program for it. Then these hackers may get tired of Apple's tightly controlled platform and may move to an open platform like Android to hack on.

At a family event recently, my 13 y.o. cousin was playing with his new iPod Touch. So I started asking him questions about it, and he tells me about how he's going to root it, going into some decent detail. I was pretty impressed! It just goes to show, Apple engineers can't keep kids from learning about their iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad, no matter how hard they try.

"If I had a clunkier technology in front of me, I might learn more about programming"

This article seems to pursue an odd dichotomy, that the platform can either be openable or slick - never both.

Surely those two aren't completely mutually exclusive.

No - because they are expensive. It's like claiming that Mercedes is destroying the hot-rod industry because kids can't get the engine management codes.

Macs were never for hackers now iApple isn't - so what?

Macs were never for hackers

Sure they are. Macs are full Unix workstations that can also run Office and Photoshop, with a much better UI than Linux. The meme that Apple's computers are deliberately unfriendly to hackers has never been true, until the iPhone and iPad.

Wait a second, a challenge, an obstacle, an opponent.

This is not being unfriendly to hackers.

This is like one of those cat toys with the wand and the feather at the end to a rambunctious kitten. In some respects it's the most hacker friendly device out there right now because of the bragging rights it creates.

A lot of hackers love their Macs.

Macs were never for hackers

ooo... them's fightin' words :)

Non-standard hardware, that's all there is to say. I don't know anyone who upgrades, repairs or hacks macs. Any hackers I know that use macs don't really care about the unique mac features, usually they just want an oem *nix machine with approved hardware. This is a decent option for a second computer, or portable, when price isn't that much of a concern.

I didn't realize everyone would buy iPads for their kids to the exclusion of everything else. It must be like the 80s when Speak and Spell destroyed that generation of tech whizzes.

People who look at the iPad and declare the death of hacking remind me of the people who in the middle of the internet boom saw the AOL-TW merger as the death of independent content.

Are "apps" so bad? In a perfect world, everything would work great on all standards-compliant browsers. But here I am, using Google Docs on Opera and it's destroying my homework.

As far as operating systems go, MS-DOS did more to encourage my technical knowledge than Windows ever did, and I stopped using DOS around the time Windows 98 came out.

But people who are drawn to tinkering probably wind up with better uses for their mental energy when they have easy-to-use operating systems. Pretty much everyone who has an iPad also has access to a machine they can do development on.

"Pretty much everyone who has an iPad also has access to a machine they can do development on."

For now.

To be honest - it feels ridiculous that the iPhone seems to need a computer so much. And I would imagine the iPad (or perhaps the iPadHD/iPadCamera/iPadNextGeneration) will feel slightly the same way.

> Pretty much everyone who has an iPad also has access to a machine they can do development on.

I didn't until recently, when I had to start working on a project who's purpose is to automatically build iPhone projects.

I can't tell you enough how much it sucks not being able to run "xcodebuild" on top of a Linux machine.

This blog post (thankfully the economist hasn't published it as an article) is just another excuse to mention the word "iPad".

Apple IIgs opened the programming world to me back then. I have to give a big thanks to Apple

"Apple is watering down computing" has been the principle argument governing the PC v. Mac holy war since the Macintosh made its debut. Nothing has changed.

which is odd considering every mac ships with Apache, Python, Ruby and who knows what else installed, ready to go. Windows ships with... (honestly, I have no idea)

Yes.

How exactly? care to elaborate?

No.

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