Hacker News Reader

Comment by gr2m | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

"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

> 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 ;-)

>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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com