

I Love Walled Gardens - chibea
http://www.rinich.com/post/358597818

======
keyist
There is a direct analogy to creative writing.

The publishing equivalent of Apple would have stifled e.e. cummings for his
abuse of punctuation. You wouldn't have Jabberwocky because it contained
imaginary words. You wouldn't have Joyce because the App^H^H^HBook Store
reviewers decided that it made absolutely no sense.

The examples above are all of writers tinkering with English, tinkering with
writing, hacking the language to accomplish things that otherwise would have
been impossible before. A closed system takes all these away.

You shouldn't dismiss the effect of walled gardens on hackers just because you
can't or won't empathize with our bit-twiddling.

~~~
rinich
Bullshit. If somebody broke UI rules in as brilliant a way as Cummings did it,
Apple would accept the app. Meanwhile, publishing companies reject poets with
shitty punctuation every day. The fact that Cummings was published has a lot
to do with the fact that his punctuation was awesome. (Also, Cummings wrote
more typical sonnets before he started experimenting, so there was precedent.)

If you want to be experimental, be it online. Nobody can deny access to your
HTML5 creations. In fact, Apple's one of the biggest pushers of compliant
modern web browsing.

------
Tichy
"Instead, they will go to the carefully-screened App Store, and they will
search for “How do I make video games”, and they will find a little button
that teaches them and gives them a run-time environment in which to tinker."

A small problem: run-time environments are not allowed in the app store.

~~~
rinich
I responded to that in the other thread about this article. It's a damn shame.

Can you make one that downloads to the iPhone/iPad and run natively? There's
nothing in an RTE that needs to access Internet files, right? So theoretically
you could program it in its entirety and have people download that.

I'm sorry I didn't know that when I wrote the article, though; certainly it
throws a nasty complication into the works.

~~~
Tichy
I haven't really programmed the iPhone yet, so I am not sure. However, I must
admit there might be one way out: there is a JavaScript interpreter on the
iPhone. I guess if you made a simple form and had it's contents be evaluated
by JavaScript at the press of a button, Apple would OK it (not certain,
though). Unfortunately JavaScript is quite restricted on the iPhone, too (I've
heard it just gets killed if it runs too long, too long being on the order of
seconds).

Not sure what Apple would say if you wrote an interpreter for something else
than JavaScript in JavaScript...

------
tdoggette
_“But Rory, programming is my passion. I was willing to spend that long
learning how to code.” No, I think back at them — programmers are not given
the satisfaction of hearing my voice. No, you were willing to spend that long
because you had obsessive-compulsive problems mixed with an antisocial
attitude._

The fact that he's pretty clearly trolling in the passage above doesn't make
it less worth reading, as it does discuss some interesting points about how
people use and learn about computers.

~~~
rinich
Can I jump in here and issue a minor clarification?

I am not a troll. I am a creative writer. I care much, much more about whether
I'm writing in interesting and fun and amusing ways than I do about any
pretense of formality, particularly in this piece. (I alternate between phases
of more serious writing and more tongue-in-cheek. This is very much the
latter.)

I don't like the suggestion that the instant a piece of writing stops being
formal or serious, it becomes a troll piece. In this case in particular, I
thought that there was a very specific reason to write it in the way that I
did: Partly it's to highlight the fact that I think this particular criticism
of Apple is a tad silly, for a variety of reasons. But it also deflates _me_ ,
and indicates that perhaps this argument, while relevant, should not be taken
as my attempt to speak the word of God.

~~~
tdoggette
It's not that it's unserious, it's that parts of it were clearly written to
get a rise out of people. Maybe "flamebait" is a better term.

~~~
rinich
But it wasn't.

As I wrote elsewhere on this thread: I didn't want this posted to Hacker News.
I was writing for a different audience of people, one that enjoys a little
melodrama and overdescription. I didn't expect anybody in that "programming"
umbrella to read this.

I'm sorry that it's wound up here, but it wasn't trolling and I resent the
accusation.

~~~
tdoggette
You posted an essay on the internet about a new Apple product and how it
relates to the hacker mentality.

It includes such tidbits as " _...people won’t be able to satisfy their
computer curiosities. To which I again say: Good! Then they’ll have to satisfy
their curiosities about emotional maturity and social interaction..._ " and
that paragraph I cited above about obsessive-compulsive tendencies and an
anti-social attitude.

It attacks the stereotypical perception of the nerd (especially the "hacker"
type) while discussing the future of open versus closed computer systems. Who
did you think your audience was? Furthermore, you end it with, " _Only our
chance to pontificate endlessly, to people who don’t think you’re as smart as
your derogatory t-shirt claims._ " That's aimed pretty squarely at the group
you're criticizing.

I really did enjoy reading it, and it was insightful and interesting. Whether
or not it was aimed at the programmer audience, it's on a topic that's of
interest largely to that audience, and it certainly _seems_ as though it's
designed to elicit a negative reaction. Calling it trolling might be an
overstatement, but it makes many of its points through attacking a large
portion of the people that are likely to read it.

~~~
rinich
I actually tried to write an explanation upthread a bit; hopefully that'll
calm things down.

There's a lot of hyperbolic criticism about the iPad that I don't think is
justified. This is a hyperbolic response. In some threads here and elsewhere I
have tried to state my ideas rationally, but when you have hundreds of Greater
Internet Fuckwads spouting things you run out of steam quickly. This is how I
chose to unwind.

I have a beef with the Aspergers-aspiring model of the programmer. Not all
computer people are like that. I'm a computer person and I'm not; my friends
are computer people and they're not. But there are still some people who pride
themselves in how lacking they are socially, in how incapable they are of
relating with people, and they're sadly acclaimed by a lot of people. I think
it's a damn shame.

Apple draws out the worst in those people, because Apple as a company exists
almost to refute their ideas of how computers should work. They focus not on
specs and feature sheets but on usability and elegance and things that make
people who don't like computers more happy. And I love that! I think it's
what's needed to make computers and computer people as mainstream as films and
film people are. I'd like to be able to discuss Internet Topics with people
without it instantly getting me pegged as one of those nasty Internet People
in question.

So, yes, it was critical of people who wear insulting t-shirts. I don't
apologize to people here who still do, because I honestly think they've got to
mature themselves a bit. Most programmers aren't like that, and I don't have a
beef with them, and if theirs were the voices leading this conversation I'd
have written something less out-of-orbit.

------
loup-vaillant
> Not when those open systems risk confusing and alienating people who just
> want to check their mail.

Speaking of mail, I would like to be able to host it at home, where it should
be. (It's private, after all.) Thanks to the walled garden policy of blocking
the outgoing SMTP port (and no one complaining, because web mail is soo
convenient), I can't.

If Trusted Computing ever becomes the default, it won't be long before using
open systems becomes a major hassle. Because, you know, they are dangerous,
infected by viruses, used by cyber-pirates, in a word, _suspects_. Just like
home hosted mail servers.

------
danskil
I was rather upset to find no awesome pictures of walled gardens included in
this post.

~~~
rinich
The work I do for you people amazes me:

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/whereilive/coast/images/southw...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/whereilive/coast/images/southwestandayrshire/walled_garden.jpg)

------
plinkplonk
trolls love walled gardens?

~~~
tree_of_item
This is only half-trolling. There are some very good ideas here. I think the
author is absolutely correct when he says that the endless tinkering that an
"open" system allows is viewed as a useless waste of time by the vast majority
of people, and that they aren't completely wrong in that assessment.

~~~
stcredzero
An example of a good bit:

"It is not productive to spend an hour learning how to change the font on your
computer’s clock. Even if while you’re doing that you’re learning about how
computers work, you’re wasting your time and getting somewhere trivial very
slowly."

This reminds me of "computer education" programs that just teach how to use MS
Word. Yes, this will get you a job, but you'd be learning at a more
fundamental level with Squeak eToys. Or some of this:

<http://www.python.org/community/sigs/current/edu-sig/>

~~~
plinkplonk
If he said, "It is not productive _for me_ to spend an hour learning how to
change the font on my computer’s clock." he would be right.

He makes these sweeping generalizations about what is or is not productive
_for other people_ to do. By his definition all the people "tinkering with"
open source Linux, Apache, etc would be "non productive" since perfectly good
commercial alternatives existed (and still exist) for them.

~~~
stcredzero
You missed the point. Learning how one particular widget for settings in one
particular app is neither very general nor fundamental. Playing around with
Morphic and discovering that every UI widget is a little code browser, and
using the unified environment to discover robotics, math, and physics on your
own is very fundamental.

