let me tell you a thing that makes me sad: in 1984 if you bought a computer there was a fair chance it came with a manual for programming it. or you could buy one. and that book was highly practical. 101 Recipes For Your Apple II
the things in that book were really basic. calculate payments on a mortgage (yawn), store recipes, that kind of thing. "silly" stuff. except. was it? was having a diary app silly? does *your* computer have a diary app?
you want a way to keep a simple diary on your computer. not a text file you have to think about, you just want to type "diary" and begin typing and whatever is there when you hit exit is today's post. can you do that? do you know how to do that?
can you get a program for that? will it be as simple as you want? what if you could make a program? one that asks you the questions you care about, and shows you past entries the way you want them to be shown?
you know how the minimum wage hasn't tracked inflation? computers have experienced complexity inflation, and the tools for making programs haven't kept up.
we now expect things like GUIs and the ability to load and save files or connect to the internet. the tools are not matching those expectations. and when i say the tools, I mean the ones *built in to your computer*
a 1981 IBM PC came with a built in programming language that couldn't be removed. even a 1995 PC came with a built in programming language - an entire development environment in fact. qbasic was *extremely* powerful.
in 1981 you were told by the manufacturer: you! can do this! you can program. because it was assumed. and a lot of businessmen learned to program. i've since learned that the code they wrote was... pretty much up to low-end industry par, honestly.
but the heights of expectations compared to how the tools have kept up is... pathetic. fuck. if you want a GUI and you aren't a huge nerd like me you can basically go fuck yourself.
you want to connect to a website, eat shit loser. that's a RIDICULOUS level of complexity and it could be abstracted away, we could have a Klik N' Play For Applications, but nobody did this
we just let programming become the domain of the elite and allowed everyone to become disenfranchised on these machines. what a god damn shame.
i have no conclusion. i love you. good night
