How the Mac didn’t bring programming to the people | Hacker News Reader

How the Mac didn’t bring programming to the people

eclecticlight.co

3 pointsrcarmo8 comments

I would argue that with all those attempts, Apple did in fact bring programming to the people, but the old adage that you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink would seem to apply…

I also think that the enormous volume of apps in the App Store shows they’re getting a lot of people to code. Those aren’t all mega-corps doing those apps…

Automator and Shortcuts is not programming it is advanced tinkering at best. Not even every developer does this.

I done it once (for adding Finder menu items to convert video and image files to different formats) but it is so cumbersome, I will not do it next time.

If MacOS embraces Unix so much, why i need UI to create extensions? How about just supporting ${HOME}/.finderrc and allow us to make our actions there?

One can create quite sophisticated automator services, definitely living up to the idea of programming. It’s not where I would direct anyone to start learning programming (it’s not meant to do so). It’s easy to underestimate what you can do with it. Unless shell scripting and applescript aren’t programming.

Has anything/anyone brought programming to the people? It’s not a mainstream thing.

I'd argue that VB6 got close. But yeah, programming isn't particularly a "the people" sort of activity.

I think that all came down to the fact that macs were popular with a certain demographic, and that demographic didn't include many programmers.

I think I will use shortcuts though, it seems like a nifty gui automation tool.

False; a lot of programmers were interested in the Mac. The Mac had a vibrant developer community for a long time, and the early Mac had a lot of developer tools. It started to die when Windows 3.1 made it viable to ship (ugly) graphical apps on PCs, and it really withered when Windows 95 came out and Apple management at the time basically shrugged. (Windows 95 sucked ass, but consumers were convinced it was a cheap Mac alternative.)

(dupe) A longer and older discussion from several hours ago is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37546241

Reply on news.ycombinator.com