This piece is rather tepid in my opinion. The author bemoans a future that never came because of
>>an enormous influx of people into tech that are in it just for the money and that couldn’t give a damn about how they achieve their goals.
He continues talking about how things were harder in the old days, and how easy it is today, but paradoxically, too easy?
>>The barrier to entry was so high that those that made it across really knew their stuff.
>>Of course that’s not what you want, you want all this to be as accessible as possible but real creativity starts when resources are limited.
It all seems like a variation on a theme Alan Kay addressed some time ago[1]:
>>Computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were. So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture.
> He continues talking about how things were harder in the old days, and how easy it is today, but paradoxically, too easy?
It's easy to make crap and to dress it up as something good, people will pay for it and will in the end be underwhelmed by what 'computers can do', whereas it's just as hard today as it was in the 80's to make something really good. Unfortunately the crap will usually win out due to marketing.
WordPerfect came with a beautifully printed manual in a cloth covered custom ring binder and unlimited telephone support. It was a world of professionals because release cycles were a year and customers were part of the business community...as was WordPerfect.
Now everybody is a just consumer. The phrase "consumer community" may just have been invented in this sentence. [1]
There are two sources of crap. One is businesses that deliberately make stuff that sucks in the hopes that marks will buy it and keep their mouths shut out of embarrassment over being taken as a rube. There's more of that in software and everywhere else today.
The other source of crap is amateurs. There's more of that in software because access has improved. The software is analogous to homeowner construction projects. The roof is likely to leak, the walls be without insulation, and the room shaped like a scalene triangle. HomeDepot's prices help make it happen.
People are expressing their ideas more often. Most ideas are bad. The execution of laypeople is often poor.
>>an enormous influx of people into tech that are in it just for the money and that couldn’t give a damn about how they achieve their goals.
He continues talking about how things were harder in the old days, and how easy it is today, but paradoxically, too easy?
>>The barrier to entry was so high that those that made it across really knew their stuff.
>>Of course that’s not what you want, you want all this to be as accessible as possible but real creativity starts when resources are limited.
It all seems like a variation on a theme Alan Kay addressed some time ago[1]:
>>Computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were. So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture.
[1] http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523