
The drive to UI simplicity deters kids from learning about how computers work - RyanMcGreal
http://quandyfactory.com/blog/100/
======
angersock
(After reading this over, this is a little more misanthropic than I'd
intended... I'll post it regardless though.)

The drive to turn general-purpose computation devices into information
appliances is something that I find interesting and a bit disturbing. I'm not
sure that it's just a fault of streamlined UIs, though. People actively _want_
to neuter their machines to present only what they want and are familiar with,
and not a great deal else.

I'm not a Luddite, I don't believe in bashing up the machinery of the internet
because it shall enslave us all. It is bewildering, though, that when given
ever-better tools for learning and problem-solving, we've managed to infect
everything with the same bullshit advertising and consumerism memes that
plagued our parents.

Given the opportunity and mechanism for solving problems that were utterly
infeasible mere decades ago, for connecting people of different walks of life
across untold miles, and for storing several times over the combined sum of
mankind's knowledge, a good chunk of startups appear to be either banking on
advertising or data mining (for better advertising) as their core business.

Worse, our customers (read: product) flock in droves to our sites and give up
their information, buy our products knowing full well our anti-competitive
practices (secure boot, trusted computing, and all the rest) because they're
too lazy to maintain their own systems, and cheerfully pull down any of their
member that question the economic assumptions that condemn "piracy"--and we
laud and encourage them!

From time to time we see folks making light of the FSF and Stallman and GNU
and that whole mess. I'm basically convinced at this point that the only real
mistake those neckbeards have made is making the assumption that the users are
_worth_ protecting and ensuring the freedom of.

Why are people concerned about educating the next generation of willful
idiots?

~~~
victork2
Very well put together, I just want to say I fully agree with your point. To
give a face to what you describe I would say that Apple is one of the most
blatant example of what you are describing.

Furthermore the same dumbing down is happening with websites: we lose control
over the information or customization because we want a slick design. Just
take a look at modern website with just one function that are posted almost
daily on here. They just feel so empty compared to the old and clunky websites
of just a few years ago.

I don't want to make it sound like a rant but I really wonder where we went
wrong in society and decided, again, to take the simplest path and just ignore
details and be dumb about a technology that governs us all.

~~~
udp
_iOS_ may be one of the most blatant examples of what he's describing, but
Apple are not. For all the eye candy of OS X, it's still the only mainstream
operating system where a bash shell is just a click away.

~~~
keithpeter
Depending on the definition of 'mainstream' there is only one OS where the
bash prompt is _not_ one click away...

------
eykanal
I've never seen a plumber upset that not everyone they meet knows how to do
basic plumbing. Chefs don't get mad that people they meet can't cook a fancy
souffle. Why is it that so many programmers expect the world to understand
computers?

Yes, people use computers daily. They also use telephones, cars, and
projectors. They make use of cd players, mp3 players, and water fountains. Do
you think that, back in the '30s, everyone who used the then-new FM radio had
any idea how the hell it worked? Most people who watch movies don't know jack
about how to produce, or act, or edit, or manipulate film.

Kids aren't learning about computers because most kids don't care about
computers. That's just fine. Focus on those who care.

~~~
DanBC
> _I've never seen a plumber upset that not everyone they meet knows how to do
> basic plumbing. Chefs don't get mad that people they meet can't cook a fancy
> souffle. Why is it that so many programmers expect the world to understand
> computers?_

Because computers are tools, and we'd like people to be independent and to be
able to use their tools efficiently.

How much does a plumber charge to change a $0.25 washer?

Some people have a bunch of data, and they need to do stuff to it, but they
have no idea how to start or what to do. Not just 'how to create a pivot
table' but 'what icon do I click on?'.

I agree that it's not a good idea to think that everyone can pipe sed and awk
together, or can create amazing VBA tools, but it'd be nice if people could
open a program and use it well.

~~~
rimantas
You know, how to enable people to use their tools efficiently? Make it
useable. Make a great UI so the users don't have to think "how do I do X in
this program?", don't have to learn to program so they can fix your lame
program, but can just use it.

~~~
mnicole
This. And if they want to learn the what's and why's and get to the guts of
it, they'll find a way outside of that UI as I'm sure that's how we all got to
where we are in web, because we care and we're curious and neither of those
traits are disappearing in kids.

------
forgottenpaswrd
Oh, there is nothing like the smell of Luddites in the morning!(people against
change mixed with fear and mixed with "those were the times...").

So I assume this person really knows how the clothes she wears are made. Of
course if she wears socks or a sweater she will know knitting, or at least how
to manage a sewing machine(everybody should know just the basics).

Of course she will also know how her car works and repair it when needed, if
she had ever flied she will know how to pilot a plane.

Look at mee!!, I AM A GEEK! I know how to do all of the above so everybody
should!!

Now you also need qualities that are not geek nature. It seems like we have to
be everything, from playing good the piano and being a good lover to being the
funniest at the parties and work in your job like a machine, while we are the
best parents to our children and the best givers to the community.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
I'm a little surprised to see the label of luddism applied to an argument that
we should be encouraging more people to learn to program computers.

I can understand what you're saying here, but I'm not making an argument for
the "good old days" of command line interfaces and arcane commands. What I'm
arguing for is what you expressed in this comment:

"Of course if she wears socks or a sweater she will know knitting, or at least
how to manage a sewing machine (everybody should know just the basics)."

I don't know how to knit but my wife does, and I can sew well enough to make a
Hallowe'en costume, fix a button or hem a pair of pants.

All the time I see people manually, painstakingly processing data as a
necessary part of their jobs - repetitive, time-consuming stuff that could
easily be automated with a fairly simple script. If we made basic computer
programming, like basic literacy and math, a part of core education curricula,
we would empower many more people to write amateur code that's _good enough_
for the task at hand, just as most amateur writing is good enough to
communicate meaning without being slick and professional.

I'm not saying everyone should work as a software developer, any more than I'm
saying everyone should work as a writer. However, the general ability to read
and write is absolutely invaluable no matter the career, to the extent that
people who are functionally illiterate are barely employable and can scarcely
function in our society.

Similarly, I believe a general ability to write computer programs - to express
a set of steps that execute some data processing task - can become invaluable
as well and unlock a huge boost in general productivity.

~~~
Produce
>All the time I see people manually, painstakingly processing data as a
necessary part of their jobs - repetitive, time-consuming stuff that could
easily be automated with a fairly simple script. If we made basic computer
programming, like basic literacy and math, a part of core education curricula,
we would empower many more people to write amateur code that's good enough for
the task at hand, just as most amateur writing is good enough to communicate
meaning without being slick and professional.

I think that more important is the ability to at least be capable of
identifying repetitive work and asking someone more skilled in programming to
implement it. It's amazing what kind of basic things people miss when you're
asking them about what could be automated. Sometimes, you need to sit next to
them and watch them work just to identify the problem.

------
nhaehnle
It has to be said that we _only_ have what the article calls social literacy -
i.e. a largely correct assumption that everybody can read and write - because
there are laws in place that make it so. Everybody has to learn reading and
writing in school.

I don't think social computer-literacy can be achieved without making it a
mandatory part of everybody's school curriculum.

So the question we have to debate is whether computer-literacy should be such
a mandatory part of the curriculum. I am not completely certain on this, but
my instincts tell me that the answer is Yes.

~~~
keithpeter
Maths _is_ a mandatory part of the curriculum in the UK and I'm sure in the US
and in many countries. Famously, we are not very good at it as a country.
Teenagers are asking for 'real world' maths more, they don't like the abstract
nature of mathematics as found in standard syllabi.

How about incorporating mathematical modelling as part of school maths? Using
Excel/Calc or a programming environment such as Scratch?

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

Any mileage? The history of school maths by the way is pretty political: no
stats before about 1950 in the UK, and then only for the top 10%. Arithmetic
for the workers.

------
danboarder
The problem is not UI simplicity, but rather the consumer monoculture of
consumption destinations like facebook or even reddit. As the article points
out, many young users rarely go beyond popular sites and fail to learn basic
computing skills. This is a problem of users viewing the web as a new form of
couch potato TV, but I would not blame simpler UI for this phenomenon.

~~~
rimantas

      > This is a problem of users viewing the web as a new
      > form of couch potato TV
    

And this is a problem because?

~~~
batista
Because it's a bad way of living your life.

And the non-judgmental, you're all special snowflakes, do whatever, is also.

~~~
zbuc
> And the non-judgmental, you're all special snowflakes, do whatever, is also.

Oh? How are you so sure?

~~~
batista
~3,000 years of recorded history point to it.

~~~
zbuc
Is that so?

------
adrianN
And this is a good thing in general. Computers are tools, after all. When I
drive a car, I don't need to know how internal combustion engines,
transmissions, steering etc work, like it was in the early days. The same is
true for computers today. Why should the user be forced to learn all the
peculiarities of the system if all he needs is a way to talk to his friends on
the other side of the globe? If it works, it works, and if it doesn't you call
an expert.

True, you should know a bit about cars if you want to do crazy endurance races
and you should know a bit about computers if you want to use their full
potential, but the vast majority of the users won't ever need that.

~~~
antirez
The "just works" however should be only the outer shell, and if you want to do
more, or if you want to learn, this shell should be easy to remove. As you can
open your car and look inside, mess with it.

Instead many modern systems are designed to be blocked in the most basic
shell, and to deny all the rest. Like the Apple iPad for instance.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
It needs to be pointed out that there were legal struggles last century over
the _right to repair_ automobiles. Car companies didn't want third parties to
be allowed to fix their cars. At the time, governments generally decided in
favour of consumer rights to their own purchases and the benefits of
competition.

As a disturbing sidenote, the "right to repair" issue has re-emerged with the
computerization of cars: <http://www.r2rc.eu/>

------
ckannan90
I don't actually see the problem. The analogy between learning computer
programming and learning to read and write is flawed. The written word is a
tool which, to be used, requires both parties to know how to read and write.
There is no way to use written media unless you know how to read. Computer
programs are not like that. You don't need to know programming to use
programs, and there is really no problem if most people don't know how to
program. The real analogy would be programming, and knowing how to operate a
printing press. You need this knowledge to produce the end product (programs
and printed books), but not to use it. And that's fine, really.

------
mtgx
We're heading towards the Idiocracy future:

[http://acousticmonster.com/wp-content/gallery/wtf-
files/wind...](http://acousticmonster.com/wp-content/gallery/wtf-
files/windowsidiocracy.png)

------
saulrh
Necessity is the mother of invention. No necessity means no invention. Right
now, we're building an entire generation that will be unable to produce
computer innovation because they've become complacent: they believe that
facebook is the end of the computer world. That would be fine if facebook
actually _were_ the end of the computer world, but it _isn't_. In thirty years
we'll need those people to manage sprawling databases, automate more and more
complex systems, and generally bend computers to their will, and they'll be
unprepared and inadequate.

~~~
alberich
I don't see the relation here. If there was no facebook or other apps, people
would not use the computer, they would watch TV, go to pub, or stuff like
that. These people that use facebook, mostly, just don't care about computers,
they want to interact with their friends and have fun. What would you suggest?
Making facebook harder to use? Making people learn to program to publish a
message on twitter?

Users are just users, they don't want to know how it works. It was always like
this.

------
alberich
Comparing computer illiteracy with analphabetism seems a little exagerated. I
remember seeing this same divide between geeks and people who couldn't care
less ten years ago.

And about the quote: "The kids I have, and that is roughly two dozen of the
brightest young digital artists a semester, often have no idea what Microsoft
Word is. They can't tell a Mac from a PC. And forget Excel," he says. He
struggles to get his students to use basic computing etiquette." Maybe they
should raise the bar for entrants to this course... really.

update: how can those students be the brightest digital artists if they can't
even tell if they are working on a Mac or PC?

------
forgottenpaswrd
As someone said "genius" or experts are always special. Just because everybody
uses a computer, it does not mean that everybody will be the next Euler.

But it does not mean either than there are not going to be more Eulers. Quite
the contrary, the barriers to know for those that want it are smaller than
ever. And there is people that care. They are a minority, but they are there.

The worst thing you could do is to try to force it to all, as what was a
pleasure becomes a sin as Feynman realized.

~~~
vidarh
As a demonstration of the difference in barriers: When I was 10 I wanted to
learn assembly. I didn't have any books about it. None of my friends did. This
was 1985, so I didn't have internet access (nor would I have a modem for
another 7 years). My local library had some low level books on electronics
with vague descriptions of how CPU's worked. None of the local book stores had
anything.

We "knew" we had to get machine instructions into memory somehow, but we
didn't know how they were encoded, and we didn't know anything about how even
BASIC was encoded in memory on our C64's. But we tried to figure it out, and
got pretty much nowhere. At some point we resorted to trying to POKE the names
of BASIC keywords into memory. Not only was it not assembler, it's not even
how C64 BASIC does it. Our efforts petered out.

After ages I got hold of a pirated copy of an assembler written in BASIC that
I could start figuring out. It got me a bit further, but not much. It was
first one or two years later I finally got hold of decent quality assembler
and tutorials and started learning assembler properly.

I do think it's sad that programming is not made more "visible", though. E.g.
take automation. Most OS X apps supports being automated with AppleScript, but
how many users even know it exists? Increasingly Linux applications supports
automation via DBus, but it's the same situation.

I've not seen widespread usage of cross-application automation since ARexx on
AmigaOS, which turned a large number of casual users into programmers (even if
it was "only" for simple stuff to automate their own workflows) despite how
horribly lacking ARexx is in user-friendliness, simply because it helped them
get their stuff done better and they could start small (one line scripts to
tell an application to do something when they pressed some icon, for example)
and build on that.

Just making automation tools more discoverable would be a major step towards
getting people more interested.

------
bvlaar
When I was younger between the ages of 9-15 I loved hardware hacking. I would
take apart Xboxes, Play Stations and even my computers. I would install mod
chips, homebrew software and even tacky lighting. Being apart of the hardcore
gaming community (CS, Team Fortress, WoW) almost instilled the notion of
modding your 'rig'. People would overclock and and liquid cool their PCs which
is hardcore stuff. I feel like there are two things that have led to a
decrease in the hardware hacking environment (which I feel is parallel to the
author's point).

1.Manufacturers began to 'get it'. Computers began to look cool, no more beige
boxes and lame looking side panels. With the birth of Aleinware, the Dell XPS
and Falcon Northwest came a huge blow to the modding community. Instead of
spending days modding your PC to make it look cool and perform well, you could
buy one out of the box (sometimes even overclocked)! This started to eat away
at the modding culture. Even console makers stepped their game up in terms of
connectivity. They began to provide more codecs for video playback which was
one of the main reasons to mod a console- to allow video playback.

2\. Another thing happened which pulled me and others away from the
modding/hacking community- I bought a Mac. Ever since I moved into the Apple
ecosystem I haven't opened up a piece of hardware. I bought my first Macbook
when I was 16 and loved it. It worked, it did everything I needed it to. I
moved more into the less horsepower social game landscape where I didn't need
the heavy duty processing power. Once I was in the Apple ecosystem I didn't
need a home NAS server running with my torrents, I began buying my music,
movies and TV shows. This content then streamed on my devices (Apple TV and
mobile) perfectly. It required no hacking to work, it all came together
effortlessly. I feel like this is happening to a lot of hackers. I deep down
feel Apple has made people complacent with current technology and has really
created a lack of need to hack your hardware and software.

This begs a question, has the paradigm shifted from enthusiasts pushing the
envelope with hardware and software to the technology companies?

------
realize
Not everyone needs to know how computers work. There will always be some who
do, and most who don't. That's the way it has been and the way it probably
always will be.

------
rsanchez1
The objective of simplifying the UI is to reduce as much as possible what a
user has to learn. The thinking is that the less a user has to learn, the more
a user gets to do and as a result the greater satisfaction gained by the user.
Satisfied users are good for sales, so UIs have been getting simpler to
generate more money.

It's no surprise that UI simplicity deters kids from learning about how
computers work, since UI simplicity is supposed to deter learning, or
eliminate the need to learn as much as possible.

------
zbuc
I wonder if this same argument was made when computers first had mouses and
GUIs introduced...

It's a silly, pointless argument. Absolutely without merit.

------
treelovinhippie
So you build tools that attempt to make it easier to make mobile apps
(PhoneGap, Trigger, Titanium etc) and the geeks cry "use native code!".

I'm looking forward to the day where we can build any website/app/program/idea
by simply having a conversation with our computers (or the cloud). 12 year-
old: "I want a mobile app that finds my friends on Facebook nearby", comp:
"Sure, how's this?", 12yo: "Cool, I want to be able to post a message to all
nearby friends", comp: "Here you go. Do you want it to send an SMS or a push
notification or?"...etc...

As much as 98% of HN will hate this concept, the faster coding can become more
modularized and easy enough for the mainstream to build whatever idea comes to
mind, the better off society will be and the faster humanity will progress.

~~~
rickmb
If we ever build computers smart enough for that, they'll probably also be
smart enough to tell us to go f __* ourselves. Even more probable if by that
time we are still preoccupied with social networking trivialities.

