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Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

I think the author is not talking about career programming. If that's your job, you have no excuses not learning command lines and all the other stuff.

This, I think, is more intended for people who are not really programmers, but would like to write a bit of logic, and find themselves with tools intended for professionals.

Because I am an experienced programmer now, I may be biased but I have a feeling we raised the barrier to entry for programming. The author mentions Excel, that still exists and us used all over the world by non-programmers to write terrible macros. But I am also thinking about Visual Basic, a lot of stuff by Borland (thinking about Delphi). DOS even shipped with Basic IDE.

As a general rule, I consider all "don't be lazy" arguments wrong. Machines are meant to work for us, not the other way around. The only ones who shouldn't be lazy are those who write the tools, so that users can be if they want to.

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I want the play the piano but don't want to put in the time. Answer "don't be lazy". I want the learn to dance but don't want to put the time. Response: "Don't be lazy".

What is special about programming that should be easy where playing the piano or learning to draw well is not? Maybe it's just fundamentally hard?

I'm not suggesting it can't be made more approachable for beginners and for small tasks but most non-trivial things someone wants to make, they have 1000s of questions that need to be answered and even more combinations. Making the tools better, for the most part, won't remove that complexity IMO.

Take the stereotypical "To Do" starter app. First you just have an array (db) of todos and they have title, text, done fields, and that's it. Then you add due dates, dependent tasks, assigning ownership for tasks, oh, you just made it multi-user, you now need login, ownership, editing rights, migrations when someone quits. You probably have user settings, machine local settings, user account setting, People want different displays of the data, sorted different ways, or with graphs. They need formatting for printing. You want notifications when a task gets reassigned but you don't want them notified on every device. Oh, suddenly you have users in foreign office, they need it localized., etc.. It gets extremely complicated very quickly.

> I want the play the piano

I think this is not exactly the same. Tom is I want to X, but I don't want to learn Y. Consider

> I want music at my party but I don't want to learn the piano

Easy, just put on spotify

> I want to compose, but I don't want to learn the piano

Well there are many evolving tools for doing that without needing to learn the piano, such as sibelius.

Following that logic.

> I want an app to do X but I don't want to learn how

Just hire someone to make it for you

> As a general rule, I consider all "don't be lazy" arguments wrong.

I don't agree nor disagree, but I just wanted to point out the hypocrisy of this argument:

If someone is too lazy to learn how something works, would it not be hypocritical for them to complain about the laziness of other people, that fail to make it easier for them?

And if this lazy person writes their own stuff, would they be diligent enough to make it easier for others?

It would be something different if that person was actually not lazy and, after understanding something, could point out or help implement ways to make the introduction for the next person easier.

When you put it this way, it makes perfect sense. My first computer C64 came with Basic pre-installed and that's how an eight year old learned to code. I guess the equivalent would be, that there would a button 'code' on the browser UI, and that would lead the user onwards.

Open the Developer Console. Get cracking.

Exactly, that's what is weird about the whole premise of the article.

Well, a developer console with "import" support and some GUI frontend to npm would be something the author wants. Sounds not that hard, right?

Dev console is a debugger, not a code editor. It's useful for us to assist in developing web applications. It's far less useful for a non-engineer to tinker around with and make simple things.

You can't install npm packages. There's no simple UI to alter DOM like via drag and drop. Theres's no pre-built components (besides html) to easily create more advanced functionality. They have to write JS from scratch to add events. Managing more than 1 liners is a pain.

I think the barriers are lower. As a kid, my obstacles were things like not having access to a free compiler. Or maybe I could have gotten a free one but I was a kid and the only ones I was aware of were hundreds of dollars, way out of reach. Now I can download any compiler I want for free, as well as tools like VSCode, Visual Studio etc. Also there are environments like Dr. Racket, which are awesome and can be used to build basically any kind of application, and come with all the tutorials at your fingertips.

> I think the author is not talking about career programming.

Yes, and I'll be honest and say that I missed that to begin with. The author is also not a developer, which is why he is mistaken on a number of specifics. I think concentrating on those specifics miss the point of what he's trying to relate.

I think the barrier to start coding is incredibly low at the moment though. There are so many learning resources and even websites that provide a full stack including a web based ide. The barrier to doing it completely on your own hardware may be slightly higher than it used to be because everything requires so much customizability that it ends up being difficult to operate. Of course there are simpler option out there but they don't get as much press as the more capable tools.

I don't think he solved the crux of his excel problem though: excel provides an easy way of coding, providing the input for the code, and presenting the results in productive manner. Most environments make this fairly painful for the beginner, requiring you to parse text files or similar. This allows beginner excel users to be productive quickly. Of course, baking node into the browser isn't going to solve that.

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