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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
@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.
'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.'
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.
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.
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.