24 Nov
2024
24 Nov
'24
6:27 a.m.
At 2024-11-23T16:07:15-0700, Adam Thornton wrote:
I was one of those 80s kids who grew up with 6502s
with BASIC in ROM.
I was Z80 and M6809. The rivalries back then were serious business. ;-)
Yeah, I learned some bad habits from that, but they
weren't that hard
to unlearn, and they, at the very least, got me screwing around with
computers and figuring out how to make them do what I wanted.
The ease with which you could lock up the machine for force a reset by
causing a processor fault--no hardware traps on these guys--made a
pretty severe instructor.
A couple decades later we had PHP for the web, which
did almost
exactly the same thing: made the barrier to entry, for getting stuff
you wanted to see on the screen actually show up there, really low.
PHP was what I had to deal with for my first paying gig during the
golden age of "e-commerce". Even as naïve as I was back then (some
say I am still), I recognized a language that was dangerously sloppy.
I recall that PHP had a stretch that resembled the legendary Sendmail
Root Hole of the Week.
And yeah, a bunch of people wrote a bunch of terrible
web pages, but
at least some of them, I'll wager, got inspired by that to learn more
and do better.
Sneering at BASIC is exactly the same sort of irritating
privileged-ivory-tower BS that The Unix-Hater's Handbook and the cult
of ITS represent.
Acknowledged, but there _is_ some funny stuff in TUHH. Will programming
culture ever manage to simultaneously avoid both the greener-grass _and_
the drinking-one's-own-Kool-Aid fallacies?
If RMS's is an example of ITS cult humor, it's pretty weak sauce.
Sure, in some perfect world, people would learn better
habits and have
access to more capable (and therefore grossly more expensive)
machines, but in the world in which we actually live, a
really-low-barrier-to-entry for smart kids without tons of money is a
lovely democratizing force.
Everybody has a smart phone. That could be a democratizing force (and
has been, in some contexts). Unfortunately smart phone platforms are
locked-down, walled-garden environments for the "delivery" of
"services" and exfiltration of enormous tranches of personal
information for the convenience of advertisers, law enforcement, and
intelligence agencies of every country.
But it seems like the price threshold is no longer a problem. Maybe
what we need is a completely hackable convergence device that you can
plug into any commodity TV, keyboard, and thumb drive and go. No need
to build a radio into it. Let that be an optional external peripheral.
Maybe this already exists and I'm just not aware of it, or maybe all the
VCs of the world have decided that there's "no market" for them.
I haven't priced out FPGAs recently, but hackability all the way down to
the gate level seems like a terrific thing to unleash the next
generation of kids on. We could have a self-taught Nisan and Schocken
on every block.
Regards,
Branden