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Comment by read_wharf | Hacker News Reader

"Further, a car is simple to use out of the box"

Exactly my point. They didn't use to be simple. Crank, choke, throttle, water in the battery, where's the next fuel repository, where are my goggles, where is the rug for my legs, etc. Now they are, and you just think of moving your body from here to there, and almost not at all about how to make your car help you do that. Now people use a car casually.

It's that kind of change, only much more profound and difficult to achieve, that will be needed before people can "program" (if we still call it that) computers casually.

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The difference is that it was easier in the past for people to program casually; it hasn't gotten easier. Consider the microcomputers of the 80's: it was very difficult to own one without knowing at least a bit of some BASIC dialect. Consider microcomputers now: most people get away without ever knowing what it's like to write a program. People who actually want to learn how to program must go out of their way to do so (and that's if they even realize programming is a possibility).

So, perhaps computers themselves have progressed much like cars. It is now possibly to use a computer casually. But programming per se is significantly less casual than it once was.

You used to have to type in 1s and 0s on a keyboard, or cut little square holes in a piece of cardboard with an Exacto knife. You had to learn what opcodes were represented by those 1s and 0s, in which contexts, and reverently hand your stack of cards full of holes to the Keeper of the Card Reader. You had to really, really want to program, with books open on the desk and your lap, and a grilled cheese sandwich holding open the one on your lap. I don't know if that's formal, but it sure doesn't sound like a casual drive around the block to me.

I wouldn't know an opcode from a gerund, and I don't want to know.

Now I can Write a Program for Dummies, or I can write Python the Hard Way, or I can <script>alert('hello world')</script>, all as close as https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=how%20do%20I... while holding a sandwich in one hand. That's not as casual as the OP would like, but it's pretty darn casual compared to The Day.

Edit: vocabulary.

Just because it's not difficult doesn't mean it's casual. There's a higher barrier to entry now than there was in the 80s, and that makes programming much less accessible to the casual computer user. The average user perceives coding as a feat attainable by only wicked smart, socially inept nerds.

Are you serious? The barrier to entry for learning programming has never been lower than it is now.

I remember what it was like beginning programming in the 80's and trust me, it was much harder then.

Back then BASIC was the only language I could get for free. In order to learn C I had to (1) buy an upgraded version of my computer (CoCo 3) that had more memory to run an OS, (2) buy the OS-9 operating system (3) buy a C compiler for said OS (4) buy the K&R book. In total, I think that cost around $400, which explains why I didn't learn C until after I graduated (EE, not CS) and had a job to pay for that stuff.

Last year, to learn Javascript I opened my browser, got a free download of Notepad++, searched a Javascript tutorial and began programming. If I wanted to learn C from scratch today, it would be as simple as downloading gcc. Not to mention that expert help if I get stuck is all over the net.

Getting started in technology, at any level I can think of, is much easier today than at any time in the past.

Good points. I suppose I'm just being nostalgic about instant-on computers with a welcoming BASIC prompt. My Timex Sinclair 1000 even came with a couple of BASIC manuals!

My point was that you now have to go out of your way to learn to program. There are a lot of options, and casual programming involves a lot of libraries (which usually themselves depend on libraries). Those microcomputers were very inviting in that regard.

My point was that a car is an application. Facebook is also simple to use out of the box, and is far more "a car for the web" than a "transportation logistics engine for the web". There is NOT an intuitive interface out there for designing a car or a robust transportation logistics system.

But there is an interface for cars that has evolved into something that is intuitive, and all new cars are designed with that in mind.

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