

Is Google App Inventor A Gateway Drug Or A Doomsday Device For Android? - gvb
http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/11/google-app-inventor/

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ekidd
What a shiny toy! I always loved Basic, Logo, Apple's old Cocoa programming
language (the visual app creator, not the framework), and Lego Mindstorms.
Some of these environments were better for actual hacking than others, but
they were all amusing.

It saddens me to see such a cool toy presented in terms of platform politics,
and to see people arguing that allowing more people to write dodgy programs is
_bad_. My goodness, I personally wrote a lot of dodgy programs back in school.

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paulgb
I agree. As much as people complain about what Visual Basic did for
application development, to a fifth-grader the ability to create a GUI with a
mouse is pretty cool.

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rbanffy
It's what Visual Basic was for Windows - it allowed hordes of developers to
write GUI applications for the first time.

It's both. A gateway drug and a doomsday device.

It reminds me of Scratch and Borland's ObjectVision. The educational slant is
probably a preemptive strike against Microsoft's attemps to capture the higher
educational market through free tools and bundles. Seems a natural move.

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Indyan
If its like VB for Windows, then it's still good news. But god help us if it's
like Frontpage :|

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rbanffy
Not sure. VB ruined a lot of programmers. I am not sure I would have survived
VB if I hadn't had a proper intro to OOP with Smalltalk and Actor.

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cheald
I'd be willing to argue that VB widened the pool of potential programmers more
than it ruined existing programmers. I started Windows development in VB, and
I moved past it in a year or two, but as a 14 year-old, I probably never would
have started if my only option had been C++/MFC.

VB has a valuable place in the programming pipeline, because it helps the
novice see his programs in terms of what he's used to interacting with.
Starting him there lets him get a taste for it, and when he runs into a
problem that VB (or AppInventor) can't handle, he says "okay, how can I solve
this problem?" and moves onto the more powerful (and more esoteric) stuff. I
wouldn't touch VB6 for real-world applications development today, but I
readily recognize the role it played in getting me to where I am as a
developer today.

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jackowayed
Doomsday Device? Really Techcrunch? Because all of those WYSIWYG sites were
doomsday devices for the web, right?

It's not like the app store (on Android or iOS) is currently composed of
nothing but spectacular apps. Most of the apps in both app stores are pretty
crappy.

Recommendation is already a very important way that people find apps. I had an
iPhone for a year, and I basically never blindly searched the app store. Maybe
for a magic 8-ball app. But all the major apps I used were recommended to me
by friends with iPhones, mentioned on some blog I read, etc.

And even people that I know that occasionally browse apps browse the "top"
pages, which filters out the crap (more-or-less).

Also, it's _Google_ that helped people sort through the crap on the web. If it
really becomes a problem, I'm sure they have some people who could develop
algorithms to make the good Android apps rise to the top of searches.

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nnash
The android market is a much smaller ecosystem than the web. If most of the
apps there are already useless, as the writer says, this will just exacerbate
the problem.

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Rhapso
Visual Basic got me into programming in middle-school. The way you suck the
children in, is to give them a tool like this, with almost instant efficacy,
it allows them to grasp that their ideas can be made real, and that it is not
as impossible as they might have thought, then you should promptly give them a
problem that VisualBasic/Scratch/Inventor cannot solve.

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jqueryin
@rbanffy, you and I are on the same page with this one. I just commented in
the other section with something along the same lines:

"I saw this on twitter this morning and noticed a glaring similarity in the
GUI design and that of MIT's SCRATCH programming language geared at teaching
children how to program. They both utilize the concept of visually displaying
code segments as "building blocks" which fit together like puzzle pieces to
give a visual representation of whether or not code will work.

I commend the approach to get more parties interested in programming and
mobile web application development. Perhaps this opens up a whole new world of
potential for getting mobile applications development into the classroom at a
very young age. On the downside, we might end up with an influx of even
crappier Android applications in the market. I already have a hard enough time
filtering through the crapplications as it is.

Here's the link to SCRATCH for those unaware:"

<http://scratch.mit.edu/>

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jamesbritt
'They both utilize the concept of visually displaying code segments as
"building blocks" which fit together like puzzle pieces to give a visual
representation of whether or not code will work.'

Sounds like Lego Mindstorms as well.

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giantfuzzypanda
Things like Lego Mindstorms help kids move on to the next step - maybe Visual
Basic or Python. No one starts off with programming, it's usually WYSIWYG or
similar paradigms.

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jamesbritt
"No one starts off with programming, it's usually WYSIWYG or similar
paradigms."

Or Excel.

People do the weirdest things with it, folks who would be perplexed if you
suggested that their improvised use of a spreadsheet made them a hacker.

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jwhitlark
Actually, I see two very important use cases that don't seem to be coming up.

1) This should allow devs to get to something resembling a MVP quickly to
validate a new idea.

2) I think this will make android the preferred platform for mobile vertical
apps., the kind of one-off solutions that are not profitable to bigger
players.

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elblanco
It could make for an excellent live interface prototyping tool as well.

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pavs
Is Techcrunch a sensationalist tabloid or last bastion of quality journalism?

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commandar
Techcrunch is Gawker for people interested in startups.

Incidentally, this quote from Nick Denton applies to TC as much as it does
Gawker:

“We don’t seek to do good. We may inadvertently do good. We may inadvertently
commit journalism. That is not the institutional intention.”

[http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/07/with-ad-revenue-
up-35-gawke...](http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/07/with-ad-revenue-up-35-gawker-
media-returns-to-pageview-bonuses-and-plans-checkbook-journalism/)

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greg7gkb
Oh God. Let the crapstorm begin...

