Man who celebrates the invention of the wheel laments that people won’t reinvent the wheel

Name all the bones in your body

Sixty years ago as this article was published in 2014

The Tandy (i.e. Radio Shack) TRS80 was affectionately known back then as the Trash 80. My first experience at programming was in high school in 1971 or 72 on a paper-roll teletype style terminal, that was connected to a PDP-11 at OMSI (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry). It wasn’t even a class, just an after-school activity run by our math teacher, Mr. Tuhy. My masterpiece was a tic-tac-toe program that could always win if it went first, and always at least tie if the human went first. I accidentally deleted it lol.

To be fair, we are at a point where most users will never need to program anything as most needs are already met by existing work. The whole “there’s an app for that” marketing had a lot of truth to it.

Why should they? Less users are programming anything, but more people have become users of computers in the first place. And we have more users of computers, precisely because the levels of abstraction do not require the ordinary user to program anything. Today’s ordinary user is more “ordinary” than fifty years ago. This development of making a tool or subject more accessible to the layman, by hiding the complexities with abstractions and yet allowing more skilled users to gain advantages by peeling away the abstractions, is present in many different fields throughout the history of mankind.

If you look closely, it is not really surprising. Not even a problem at all. In fact, if you have the simple understanding that maybe somebody doesn’t want to program, not because they are a stupid idiot or a lazy normie consumer, but because they simply don’t give a shit about it, follow other interests and can contribute to the world with other skills, then the observation that most users are not programming anything, is insanely unproblematic.

140 years after the automobile, most drivers can’t or won’t repair their car!

I dunno about this; IME even when it was highly approachable most people didn’t do it. I was around back then, got my first Commodore in '84, and even the Geek / Nerd circles were mostly just for people swapping copies of commercial software. It wasn’t any better when I graduated High School in '91 and even in College almost no one outside of STEM was doing any programming.

It wasn’t and still isn’t a popular activity.

It will only get worse with the phone and tablet generation and LLMs.

Programming is alien. It’s fundamentally hard to comprehend, because the computer will do exactly what you tell it to, regardless of what you mean. You have to think for the both of you.

College computer science courses have had to go back to teaching students what computer files and folders are. A lot of computer programs have simplified themselves as ease of use overtook features as a driving factor for use.

Most people don’t know how to program because they don’t know the basics of computing.

I dunno. I’ve been programming on and off since the 1980s and professionally since the early 2000s. It still always takes me forever to build anything worthwhile and even longer to maintain it. Most software these days is complicated enough that it requires many people to build and maintain. I’m not sure that “everyone should be equipped to program what they need” was realistic even back in the 1980s, let alone with today’s complexity.

Most users don’t want to be sucked down a bottomless time hole just getting their computer to do a thing it won’t do, and understandably prefer to have someone else suffer this for them, then use what was built.

So I don’t know about the goal of everyone being able to program. I still think it’s a worthwhile goal that people should have full control over their machines so that they can install and uninstall what they want, configure devices to work the best way for them, and turn off the features that don’t serve the user at all. And I think open source software is great for bringing technically inclined people together to collaborate on what’s actually useful to people.

I see this as an accessibility problem, computers have incredible power but taking advantage of it requires a very specific way of thinking and the drive to push through adversity (the computer constantly and correctly telling you “you’re doing it wrong”) that a lot of people can’t or don’t want to do. I don’t think they’re wrong or lazy to feel that way, and it’s a barrier to entry just like a set of stairs is to a wheelchair user.

The question is what to do about it, and there’s so much we as an industry should be doing before we even start to think about getting “normies” writing code or automating their phones. Using a computer sucks ass in so many ways for regular people, you buy something cheap and it’s slow as hell, it’s crapped up with adware and spyware out of the box, scammers are everywhere ready to cheat you out of your money… anyone here is likely immune to all that or knows how to navigate it but most people are just muddling by.

If we got past all that, I think it’d be a question of meeting users where they are. I have a car but I couldn’t replace the brakes, nor do I want to learn or try to learn, but that’s okay. My car is as accessible as I want it to be, and the parts that aren’t accessible, I go another route (bring it to a mechanic who can do the things I can’t). We can do this with computers too, make things easy for regular people but don’t try to make them all master programmers or tell them they aren’t “really” using it unless they’re coding. Bring the barrier down as low is it can go but don’t expect everyone to be trying to jump over it all the time, because they likely care about other things more.

When I was a kid in the 90s I had a PC that came with Windows 3.1 and it had QBasic. I messed around with it a lot. I spent a lot of time reading the built-in documentation.

I remember making a random password generator, a text-based blackjack game, and some “screensavers” that were basically just drawing a bunch of stuff on the screen and then scrolling it off the top by printing blank lines.

It took quite a bit of time to do that pretty basic stuff, so it’s really not a surprise to me that most people aren’t making computer programs today. Most of anything an average person could hope to program has already been done and made available for free.

50 years after BASIC and nothing is written in BASIC.

To replicate its success from the 80s we would need a language that is simple enough for everyone to learn but actually performant and powerful enough to write an entire operating system and application stack in. Then perhaps non-programmers would feel more inclined to look under the hood, see how things work, and change their program’s behavior.

The problem though, is that for any reasonably complex system or application, you need to use structured programming. This is what enabled the levels of abstraction that we use to break down programs into layers that can be understood in pieces, and it is what makes large complex software possible without ending up with a mess of spaghetti.

However it is these abstractions that turn a software’s code into a Domain Specific Language, and endless APIs that need to be learnt and understood by the programmer.

For programmers it is normal to us that when we want to work on a new codebase we have to learn the idiosyncrasies of the codebase, and learn its DSL and the APIs that it uses, or exposes. But for a non-programmer, this would essentially feel like learning everything about programming from scratch. They would have to become a programmer and develop maintainer skills just to understand what they want to change. (This is why programmer is still a job).

Perhaps the real value of BASIC was that without structured programming, every program was just a pile of spaghetti that even a child could pull apart with a fork.