Comment by gbog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gbog | Hacker News Reader

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> [dev speed has] a large impact on the overall probability of getting off the ground

I don't know. This seems common sense but it could be a cliché too.

If we look at other domains, it is not always true. For instance, if you write novels that are not tied to some evanescent trend like a pop star's private life, then the chance of getting off the ground if not directly linked to the timing of publication. It would be the same if you are creating a newly designed chair.

Even on the web, let's take two success stories: when Wikipedia or Twitter were created and made public, I don't remember seeing five other contenders running behind them, and being only two-features-months behind. Same with, say, Minecraft.

I am all for quick development, because it is more fun, but not because it would magically increase to probability of success, which is too low to compute and unpredictable anyway.

I am also all for choosing carefully which path you take, especially when you cross virgin territories. You don't want to find yourself spending a night half naked with a toothpick for your sole defense in Borneo's jungle.

Let's say today 1 of 1000 people is able to create an app to solve a problem, let's say time time tracking. Now imagine we change that drastically, to 100 of 1000 or even more. People will start to build their own little apps to solve their own little problems. And if these break, nobody cares, but them.

For example, friends of mine like to go climbing. They've build an app in an afternoon, just for their group, to keep track of what tracks they finished and how they liked it. I think this is fascinating. I wonder what would happen if students would learn to build simple apps like that in school, instead of Excel?

"Now imagine we change that drastically, to 100 of 1000 or even more. People will start to build their own little apps to solve their own little problems. And if these break, nobody cares, but them."

This was the old dream of Hypercard, and it worked very well for a long time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard

Both Danny Goodman and Bill Atkinson have stated publicly that they got programming questions from every kind of person: small business owners, school teachers, ski bums, taxi drivers, etc.

Hypercard let non-programmers build simple apps, and so a lot of apps were created that would never have been created if app-creation was left in the hands of professional programmers. And many of those little apps were tailored to what the creator needed at that moment, in a way that could never happen if a professional programmer drew up some spec.

It's ironic that the tool that has replaced Hypercard is in fact Excel. Excel makes it amazingly easy for non-programmers to develop simple applications

>I wonder what would happen if students would learn to build simple apps like that in school, instead of Excel?

If there is a school that is teaching people Excel, there is a problem with the school, and I'm not sure having easy frameworks solves that problem.

> They've build an app in an afternoon, just for their group, to keep track of what tracks they finished and how they liked it. I think this is fascinating. I wonder what would happen if students would learn to build simple apps like that in school, instead of Excel

To be pedantic, Excel would be the perfect tool for writing an app like this. A few columns, a quick and dirty VBA GUI... Bob's your uncle

yeah, but they could access the tool all from their own mobile devices, with their own user accounts ;-)

Although I agree with sentiment of your post, actually the publication date of a novel and the release date of new furniture lines are very important [the same with music, movies and just about anything where we have enough data to do trend analysis].

http://www.greenleafbookgroup.com/blog/2011/10/12/whats-the-...

(etc. etc. [seriously google it if you're interested])

I'm not sure about the novel and chair examples, but the issue of evidence of every early stage failures in general is interesting.

The other proto-pedias and Minecraft-could-have-beens never happened at all - for some people, they stayed on the drawing board and never made it to the web - so there's no evidence of them to point to at all. They left no trace.

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