This is fantastic and I'm really glad it's being bundled with Firefox and not as a separate download.
As I've said elsewhere, a lot of kids still assume that programming is essentially "magic" done by professionals and they implicitly assume there is no way to getting started at their education level (This is especially true if their parents are non-technical, as mine were). All the resources in the world may exist, but they may not be obvious unless you look for them. When I was a kid I assumed that programmers were all professionals with a billion years of training and their own special equipment. Today I know the only difference between a programmer and a yet-to-be-programmer kid are bigger feet and a coffee addiction, the computers are the very same. But I didn't know that back then - I wish someone told me.
I think it is extremely healthy to have the lowest bar possible to go from "Hey I like that" to "Can I do that? Can I make it myself?" Putting an IDE inside the browser, having no other dependencies between viewing web-pages and making web-pages is an incredible first step.
I await the day any kid asks "How do I make my own webpages?" and we can answer "You've already got everything you need, just press F12."
There's an art to making seemingly insurmountable things appear doable, like becoming a programmer if you have no programmer role models, and I think we should give it more attention. The web makes it easier than ever, and while a bundled IDE isn't going to be the Geocities or Bob Ross equivalent, it's definitely the next step in reducing the friction of getting started.
http://www.w3.org/Amaya/ is not as old (1996) but is also pretty cool. I wish they had more funding to explore that idea that the web should be editable (as long as you have the authorization to PUT).
The very first web browser had editing built in. That's why HTTP has the concept of verbs in the first place! Otherwise GET would probably be implicit. Forms and POST came later, but PUT and DELETE was part of the original idea behind the web.
I totally agree that browsers should allow editing. Even if you are not authorized to PUT the page back to the server, it would still be useful to be able to edit before you print or save the page locally.
I really have no idea why we were robbed of this capability! It was probably just laziness from the people who wrote mainstream browser and httpd implementations.
Yeah but Mozilla Composer was begat by Netscape Composer, which was part of the push into "enterprise" and being a "collaboration suite" that jwz lists as the #2 cause for sinking of the Netscape ship:
Anyone who doesn't think the Netscape ship sank is probably too young to remember pre-Firefox (or too close to events to be objective); but the fact that the ship was salvaged from near the bottom of the ocean doesn't change the fact that it did sink.
From my experience, IDEs do not help in reducing the notion that programming is somehow "magic" - on the other hand, beginners will tend to develop an attachment to them, and that's where the "magic" shifts to. Basic concepts like "source code is just a text file" will be foreign to them (I'm surprised how many supposedly educated "developers" I've encountered don't understand this.)
I think the best way to start writing webpages is with a text editor - which almost any OS out there will already have, and that IDEs are like calculators - they're a great help when you already know what you're doing, but not ideal for starting out learning.
That said, if this makes it to the stable release channel it would be a big (and positive) change of direction for Mozilla, who have had a history of removing power-user-oriented features (and most developers probably started out as power users.) I remember a thread on HN (might've been about Australis?) in which others were wondering whether they would eventually remove the "View Source" function.
This is a little bit like the early home computers. You could start writing code (basic) immediately after switching on the computer. Copy a few lines of code from magazine and see what it does.
The manual that came with the Apple IIc my family had when I was a kid included sections on programming the computer with Applesoft BASIC. What an optimistic thing to include in the manual that every user gets! And, yet, those were the first lines of code I ever typed into a computer and I'm still doing it 30 years later.
I remember small sections of BASIC in my school math book in something like 6th grade. We had a Mac with HyperCard so it looked really primitive to me :)
Yep. When I was a kid I had to type my games in from an Usbourne book. It was, in the long run, a hell of a lot better than a console and cartridges would have been.
This is a good point. I was in the same position as you as a kid. I was interested in computers, but I didn't know anyone that could teach me much about them. I assumed in college they would teach you all the secrets, I had no idea that all the tools I needed were available online. With this IDE, the barrier is super low, if Mozilla decided to market it that way.
I know what you mean. I have multiple examples of experiencing this realization about different professions.
For example, the day I discovered that they sell surveilance cameras in regular electronics stores, I was very surprised. Up until then, I had thought that only special kinds of highly trained professionals even knew how to get them and that the whole thing was a giant unified system that cost close to infinite amounts of money.
And then I'll tell him that with just a Mac (which he might already own) and a $100 dollar subscription, he can program and even sell iPad apps worldwide, to a market of half a billion people.
People seem to forget how, in those 80s computers, to get a compiler (besides the built-in BASIC one) you usually paid lots of money. And that a worldwide distribution network for your apps, with automatic payment handling et al was also out of the question. As was an SDK even 10% as complete as Cocoa Touch or the Android one.
An iPad could be a good stepping stone. For me it was Nintendo as a kid that then got me into computer games, which then got me into making my own stuff, which then made me into a programmer today heh.
What? Kids ARE the experts and if you have spent time to become a professional you are already too old. Haven't you read the agism article on HN today?
As I've said elsewhere, a lot of kids still assume that programming is essentially "magic" done by professionals and they implicitly assume there is no way to getting started at their education level (This is especially true if their parents are non-technical, as mine were). All the resources in the world may exist, but they may not be obvious unless you look for them. When I was a kid I assumed that programmers were all professionals with a billion years of training and their own special equipment. Today I know the only difference between a programmer and a yet-to-be-programmer kid are bigger feet and a coffee addiction, the computers are the very same. But I didn't know that back then - I wish someone told me.
I think it is extremely healthy to have the lowest bar possible to go from "Hey I like that" to "Can I do that? Can I make it myself?" Putting an IDE inside the browser, having no other dependencies between viewing web-pages and making web-pages is an incredible first step.
I await the day any kid asks "How do I make my own webpages?" and we can answer "You've already got everything you need, just press F12."
There's an art to making seemingly insurmountable things appear doable, like becoming a programmer if you have no programmer role models, and I think we should give it more attention. The web makes it easier than ever, and while a bundled IDE isn't going to be the Geocities or Bob Ross equivalent, it's definitely the next step in reducing the friction of getting started.
Bravo, Firefox team.