Hacker News Reader

Comment by 38 | Hacker News Reader

> The people that want to program will do so no matter what the end-user environment is. Most people just don't want to.

this is something I would expect to hear from an Apple executive, and would hope to never hear from a commenter on hacker news. the whole point here, is we should be fostering environments that make it easy to program should people want to, not assuming the default is "no one wants to program" and making it as difficult as possible, or just making it difficult by laziness (not prioritizing developer experience).

what we DON'T want, is what Apple, Google and Microsoft currently push hard. which is essentially, lets make all personal computing devices black boxes, that cannot be modified, and that the end users dont even own, but rent from their overlords. no thank you.

View on HN

I’m on board with making programming as accessible and easy as reasonably possible (though I do think there’s an unsurpassable upper limit to that), but that’s different from programming or even somewhat technical tinkering being the norm and expected. The former is achievable, the latter is a setup for failure.

The reason for this line of thinking is that in my experience, some individuals will simply never have the mindset required to be technically inclined, let alone be able to program. The various people I’ve encountered who freak out at the sight of an alert dialog and won’t even read what the dialog says no matter how many times it’s explained to them come to mind.

So while I would agree that programming should always be within easy reach I would not expect more than a tiny minority to ever reach for it.

People that want to build their own furniture will do so no matter what the end-user environment is. Most people just don't want to.

Software engineering is no more magical. Some people like to build things. Most do not.

A couch is more of a black box than a smart phone.

> Software engineering is no more magical. Some people like to build things. Most do not.

This misses the point. There are considerable advantages to Free and Open Source software even if you never modify it, the most obvious being that it tends to deter software vendors from adding user-hostile functionality such as tracking. (It isn't perfect in guaranteeing this, but it's a strong start.)

For more on these second-order advantages: [0][1]

> A couch is more of a black box than a smart phone.

In what sense?

With a smartphone full of proprietary software, it's extremely difficult to find out what it's up to. Same goes for modern smart cars. [2][3] Even if the software is benign, can you be sure about its future updates? There are no such concerns for a couch.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31071180

[1] https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary.en.html

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37443644

[3] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-...

> People that want to build their own furniture will do so no matter what the end-user environment is. Most people just don't want to.

I would rather have 10% of the population programming than 5%. replace those numbers with whatever is more accurate, but the point stands.

if we can create devices and operating systems that make programming easier, why not do that? why purposefully make it more difficult, or make it difficult by not prioritizing developer experience? do we want a society of consumers, or one of empowered and informed users?

> I would rather have 10% of the population programming than 5%.

Why? I'd rather have a society where everyone is able to achieve their full potential, whatever that may be. If only 1% (or 0.1%) of people are uniquely good at writing programs, then that's who should be writing programs.

Maybe what you're saying is that we live in a world where writing programs is an essential skill, so let's make sure it's not unnecessarily difficult for artists to write programs. But with sufficiently good tools, I don't really see why an artist would spend time writing programs instead of more directly creating art.

Pretty much everyone dabbles in art, even if very few are good at it. The same can't be said of programming.

Creating apps -- native or otherwise -- has never been easier, so I think we're doing pretty well there. Devices are indeed locked down but I would guess that most people, even programmers, don't care as long as they can create most of the user interfaces they can imagine.

How can we make better operating systems if devices are locked down? How can hobbyists keep the hardware useful when the manufacturer no longer cares?

Devices must remain open for the kernel programmers and hardware hackers of tomorrow to follow their curiosity and develop their potential.

I'd argue more things are easier to do than ever, yet making them distributable has narrowed. Before you could ship floppies from your garage, partner with a publisher, shareware, or sell to local shops. Now you have to pay gatekeepers, or train users to do dangerous things.

I fully agree with you, but with one exception: I think hacker news has very much become a place of love for black boxes. Many people here love and praise apples "it's not a computer, it's an appliance" approach.

Certainly there are black-box-ophiles on here, but there is much more awareness of the problems of black boxes on HN than most places. After all, the post you're replying to went out of its way to bring up the problem of black boxes. If this were Reddit or Twitter/X, would there even be a person around to bring up this issue?

Overall interest in computing freedom seems to have declined from where it was a couple decades ago. I've been surprised by that and I have a hard time understanding why it happened. I mean, if you show a carpenter two hammers, the only difference being that one of them can only drive nails from a specific vendor while the other works on any nail, he or she would instantly recognize how significant that difference is in terms of overall usefulness. How is it that computer users intuitively understood this in the past, but somehow the level of awareness and understanding seems to have declined from where it was? I don't get it.

> Overall interest in computing freedom seems to have declined from where it was a couple decades ago.

Did it decline, or did the demographics change? Us old-timers are probably still as interested in computing freedom as we were back then, but there are a lot of new people entering the computing world, whose first (and perhaps only) experience with computing was with more closed systems like modern smartphones (and even desktops nowadays are more closed than they were back then).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com