Comment by musicale | Hacker News Reader

Comment by musicale | Hacker News Reader

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Programming (by humans) is less accessible in 2026 because most personal computing devices don't boot into a programming environment and they don't include a user-friendly programming instruction manual (graphing calculators may be an exception however). And before the era of "there's an app for that" it was assumed that users would need to write their own programs, so systems were designed to support that. Vibe programming (by LLMs) is more accessible now however.

BASIC was designed as a simplified, interactive version of FORTRAN that non-experts could learn in an afternoon, but which was still powerful enough for a wide range of applications including numerical methods, simulations, data processing, and games. It was also small enough to implement effectively on a timeshared minicomputer or an 8-bit microcomputer.

Even though the Mac was GUI-based, for a time it shipped with, and promoted, HyperCard, which led to a brief explosion of user-created programs developed as HyperCard stacks.

Have you ever been diagnosed with ADD or autism? I don't expect you to answer back on that. People that have these characteristics tend to cluster in fields like tech. This means without any prior knowledge you self filtered to a set of actions you didn't know you had a much higher attraction to than a random sample of the population.

In addition this also increases the probability that your unaware of others peoples drives, likes, and abilities, which can easily mislead you to believe that a large portion of the is skilled like you in the same way and wants to conquer information.

> mislead you to believe that a large portion of the is skilled like you in the same way and wants to conquer information

It's worth considering that BASIC was invented to teach programming to incoming college students, most of whom had never used computers before, and most of whom would major in the humanities or social sciences. As I understand it, it became part of the required first-year math curriculum, meaning basically (pun intended) every student learned how to write simple programs in BASIC.

You are correct in the sense that it was originally Ivy League students (and some local high school students), a highly select group, but it shows that BASIC wasn't harder than first-year college math in the 1960s. Over the subsequent decades it turned out that a lot of elementary school students could learn it as well.

>most personal computing devices don't boot into a programming environment

Yes, but now everyone and their mum has a personal computing device, and there's tutorials readily accessible, and five seconds of googling can bring you to an online programming environment.

All true, but the onramp isn't included in the box. When you get a smartphone, how do you know that you could even program it? Is there any encouragement to do so vs. just buying apps? They are more like game consoles, in more ways than one.

As I mentioned, I think graphing calculators might be an exception.

In the mid 80s, something like 10% of US households had any computer at all. That the onramp is in the box doesn't really matter to the people who never saw the box.

I guess the question is how you measure accessibility - per device, or across the population as a whole? In 2026 several billion people have personal computing devices, but the devices no longer provide that programming onramp. Interestingly enough, it looks like ~25% of the world's population is still offline.

You can also pull up a repl in any desktop web browser by pressing F12.

Also true, though it seems like Peak Desktop is behind us.

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