Slashdot Mirror
Google Pulls Plug On Programming For the Masses
theodp writes "Google has decided to pull the plug on Android App Inventor, which was once touted as a game-changer for introductory computer science. In an odd post, Google encourages folks to 'Get Started!' with the very product it's announcing will be discontinued as a Google product. The move leaves CS Prof David Wolber baffled. ' In the case of App Inventor,' writes Wolber, 'the decision affects more than just your typical early adopter techie. It hurts kids and schools, and outfits like Iridescent, who use App Inventor in their Technovation after-school programs for high school girls, and Youth Radio's Mobile Action Lab, which teaches app building to kids in Oakland California. You've hurt professors and K-12 educators who have developed new courses and curricula with App Inventor at the core. You've hurt universities who have redesigned their programs.' Wolber adds: 'Even looking at it from Google's perspective, I find the decision puzzling. App Inventor was a public relations dream. Democratizing app building, empowering kids, women, and underrepresented groups — this is good press for a company continually in the news for anti-trust and other far less appealing issues. And the cost-benefit of the cut was negligible-believe it or not, App Inventor was a small team of just 5+ employees! The Math doesn't make sense.'"
Anyone who still does anything serious with Google's products kind of deserves it. Google has been for years putting some product up just to completely discontinue it soon enough. Unlike desktop software, Google discontinuing product means that you really cannot use it anymore. Google is really hurting itself and their image with this shit and ensuring competitors products like from Microsoft will continue to be widely used.
Google+ vs. Facebook, and why Google+ will fail
Democratizing app building, empowering kids, women, and underrepresented groups
So simple, even a woman can do it.
from TFA:
"With the winding down of Google Labs, Google will discontinue App Inventor as a Google product and will open source the code. Additionally, because of App Inventor’s success in the education space, we are exploring opportunities to support the educational use of App Inventor on an open source platform."
Quoted from the original source at Google:
With the winding down of Google Labs, Google will discontinue App Inventor as a Google product and will open source the code. Additionally, because of App Inventor’s success in the education space, we are exploring opportunities to support the educational use of App Inventor on an open source platform.
source
If what I just said sounded like a troll, it was probably just a failed attempt at humor.
I said this when it came out and I'll say it again - where is the real demand for this from these people the author is quoting?
Supposedly that demand is the result of anti-kid / anti-woman in other dev tools. Ah that must be emacs with its "kitchen sink" comparisons, you know, keep em barefoot, pregnant and in the KITCHEN. Of course then there is vi. My guess is vi is anti-child, because you hit escape about every 5th keystroke, and everyone knows from horror movies that some mass murder ESCAPEs and kills all the teenagers in the movie. As for perl, well you got the camel book, and camels are from the middle east, and they're not known for their feminist outlook on life.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
> And the cost-benefit of the cut was negligible-believe it or not, App Inventor was a small team of just 5+ employees! The Math doesn't make sense.'"
One of those 5 employees parked in Sergey Brin's parking spot. The rest was inevitable.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
from TFA:
"With the winding down of Google Labs, Google will discontinue App Inventor as a Google product and will open source the code. Additionally, because of App Inventor’s success in the education space, we are exploring opportunities to support the educational use of App Inventor on an open source platform."
I think it's pretty obvious what happened here. Because of close brushes with violating their "do no evil" mantra, Larry and Sergey have actually perfected time travel in order to ensure that no present actions result in future evil.
... and then, one fateful morning, as a particularly evil hacker was using App Inventor to build a smarter botnet he had the idea to use App Inventor to create an App that simply used App Inventor to progenate. And he succeeded in making it 0.000001% smarter than he himself was. And so it set out using App Inventor to make more programs that used App Inventor to make programs that were 0.000001% smarter than their parent program.
.NET Inventor overtook it.
As a result, the first subject has been sent into the future to report back only negative results from Google's products. When he returned beaten and battered and bruised, he declared that support and extensions of the App Inventor must be halted. Instead of assisting in learning, App Inventor gave uneducated kids the power of super hackers -- creating applications that could be viruses and malware. The explosion of malware on mobile phones sent markets reeling and devastated the world economy
Nothing to fear, right? RIGHT?
A few quadrillion iterations later (which Google's servers handled without any problem) and App Inventor had infected every system in the world. The result was a super brilliant application that could predict and see everything by harnessing the computation power of every implemented Turing Machine in the world. Therefore, Google had to kill App Inventor now while it still had the chance.
Larry and Sergey debated for hours whether App Inventor was inherently evil or the application of App Inventor. What was worse, was that Larry was convinced that if App Inventor was not left to run its course then mankind would face an even more evil post-apocalyptic future past that when Microsoft's
And so they came up with a simple, elegant solution that would shift all the blame onto the entire world should App Inventor become the end of mankind: open source it.
My work here is dung.
Empowering kids, women, minorities?? That's ridiculous. App Inventor's biggest problem is that it is too low-level. There is almost a one-to-one correspondence between every block in App Inventor and a single Java keyword or operator. Therefore there is NOTHING you can learn with App Inventor that you can't learn by learning to write source code. In fact the blocks themselves obscure meaning, because their visual representation doesn't convey much actual meaningful information. App Inventor could have been really, really good if it worked at a much higher level, and if the construction process wasn't so highly geometrically constrained and brittle.
There's also the reality that you can't make programming much more friendly than most of today languages.
I taught high school computer science and its amazing to see the difference between kids. But more importantly, the concepts are what is hard. It is not the expression of those concepts.
I don't know what it is with so many academics and educational people who seem to think the concepts are easy... we just need the right way to express them.
The same kid who struggles with the notion of a variable in algebra is the same kid who will struggle with the notion of a variable in a programming language. No amount of drawing boxes to show it is 'holding' a value will help any more than saying this is X.
These are just difficult concepts: variables, sequential steps, algorithms... Most of us who program take these things as trivial. Most of us who did quite well in school take these things as given. Most of us who naturally think analytically about issues take these things for granted.
That's just not how most of the population thinks. I have friends who are teachers who still don't understand what fractions really mean and how to do basic math on them.
These are just hard concepts. Part of me thinks that such people may never get it until they change their entire way of thinking. If you brain cannot comprehend the idea of a variable; you will never be able to think analytically; and you'll never be able to program.
I don't say that in a bad way. I'll probably never understand the complexity of modern art until I change my entire way of thinking.
Yet, time and time again, we see these tools which claim to make programming easy. Do you really think the big block is that a kid cannot comprehend an IF statement, yet if you draw a big diamond in a flow chart, it all becomes clear? No, that's the easy part.
Time and time again, we see educational academics trying to say we just need to express ideas in a way students can understand.
Yet, it is the concept that is hard. People can easily learn the different expressions of that concept.
But anyways. There's no demand for products like this except by academia and the education bureaucracy.
I don't see the fashion industry trying to lure more men into the business.
The University of Washington's School of Education announced, quite a few years ago, it was going to preferentially admit men to the program in an attempt to address the longstanding gender skew of the teaching force. They were forced to backtrack (and even apologize!) pretty quickly - women really got up in arms over the proposal.
#DeleteChrome