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Comment by musicale

21 hours ago

Programming (by humans) is less accessible in 2026 because most personal computing devices don't boot into a programming environment and they don't include a user-friendly programming instruction manual (graphing calculators may be an exception however). And before the era of "there's an app for that" it was assumed that users would need to write their own programs, so systems were designed to support that. Vibe programming (by LLMs) is more accessible now however.

BASIC was designed as a simplified, interactive version of FORTRAN that non-experts could learn in an afternoon, but which was still powerful enough for a wide range of applications including numerical methods, simulations, data processing, and games. It was also small enough to implement effectively on a timeshared minicomputer or an 8-bit microcomputer.

Even though the Mac was GUI-based, for a time it shipped with, and promoted, HyperCard, which led to a brief explosion of user-created programs developed as HyperCard stacks.

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musicale

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pixl97  4 hours ago

Have you ever been diagnosed with ADD or autism? I don't expect you to answer back on that. People that have these characteristics tend to cluster in fields like tech. This means without any prior knowledge you self filtered to a set of actions you didn't know you had a much higher attraction to than a random sample of the population.

In addition this also increases the probability that your unaware of others peoples drives, likes, and abilities, which can easily mislead you to believe that a large portion of the is skilled like you in the same way and wants to conquer information.

thfuran  20 hours ago

>most personal computing devices don't boot into a programming environment

Yes, but now everyone and their mum has a personal computing device, and there's tutorials readily accessible, and five seconds of googling can bring you to an online programming environment.

  • musicale  20 hours ago

    All true, but the onramp isn't included in the box. When you get a smartphone, how do you know that you could even program it? Is there any encouragement to do so vs. just buying apps? They are more like game consoles, in more ways than one.

    As I mentioned, I think graphing calculators might be an exception.

    • thfuran  20 hours ago

      In the mid 80s, something like 10% of US households had any computer at all. That the onramp is in the box doesn't really matter to the people who never saw the box.

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