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GitHub's Next Move: Turn Everybody Into a Programmer
mattydread23 writes: This interview with GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath and product VP Kakul Srivastava explains a little more what GitHub is planning for the future — and how the company is trying to live up to its $2 billion valuation. Basically, if every developer in the world uses and loves GitHub, the next logical step is to turn more people into developers. "Even today, Wanstrath says, there are journalists and scientists who are using GitHub to find, build, and share data-driven applications that assist with research or interactive projects. The goal, then, is to gradually make it a lot easier for anybody to get started on the platform. As more and more people get educated as programmers from an early age, Wanstrath wants GitHub to be the service of choice for the next generation to really get their feet wet."
Sooner or later people will realize just how horribly overvalued we actually are, and we are desperately trying to do stupid things like turning everybody into a programmer so we can continue to prop up our overvalued company and continue to reap such awesome executive bonuses.
Honestly, WTF revenue do they have? I see so damned many companies being valued in the billions, and for what seems like no justifiable reason.
It's the .com era all over again ... "zomg, we have teh social" or whatever the daily buzzword is.
It's a great way to separate investors from their money. But I remain unconvinced any of these companies are actually worth anything in the billions.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Basically, if every developer in the world uses and loves GitHub, the next logical step is to turn more people into developers.
If the starting point is false, then this has no way to succed.
balls.com, van.com and every other 1.0 failure.
This is the beginning of the end.
Let the bubble pop
they feel running cvs is worth 2 billion.
Slight over valuation?
Why do we want to turn everyone in a coder?
It's the same as turning everyone into a pianist or turning every biologists into physicist. It's about the ecosystem, we need to be different to thrive.
I, personally love mathematics, but would hate it if everyone were "forced"/"encouraged" into it. It's supposed to be fun and not a chore or imperative they needed to complete. I have had enough of that in my life.
$2 billion? It's a web front-end to fucking Git for crying out loud. As soon as you start building Oval Office replicas and have VPs of 'Product Development' you've disappeared so far up your own arse you're out of your mouth and away.
Seriously, STOP trying to make everybody a programmer. It's not going to happen, and it shouldn't happen.
Why not make everyone a plumber or a mechanic or an insurance agent? BECAUSE IT'S STUPID, just like trying to make everyone a programmer.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
...if they succeeded they'd displace every other industry and profession, which would include a large part of semiconductor manufacturing and even the humble local electrician. Contrary to popular belief it actually takes a while and lots of study to become a good programmer. It's not something you can "do on the side", at least not easily.
Yes, you can replace every electrician with a programmer, but how are you going to power that computer?
Methinks this is some massive conspiracy to turn everyone into a QA puppet so software shops don't have to bugfix anymore.
I think the next logical step is to adapt GitHub to do change management on other kinds of documents, not just source code files. It would probably help out a lot of students for them to learn how to manage all their essays and other assignments with a change management system. Working on group projects would be a lot easier if it was easier to share files and merge changes with people working on the same project.
Working with a big MS Word document with a group of people using the "track changes" feature is a lot more painful than sharing a software project between a bunch of developers. But it shouldn't be. There is a huge need for people in other fields to be able to collaborate on a document, and see how it has changed over time.
Just imagine if all the bills that were written were entered into a source control system with hourly commits before they were voted for in Congress. I would be much nicer if people were able to easily see what changed as the bill approached the floor for voting. It would be a lot harder to slip things in at the last moment.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Back in the day Visual Basic was going to remove the need for programmers. Programming GUI apps would be so easy the management could do it. That turned out OK didn't it?
Not everyone can (or should) be a programmer. They need to promote themselves as a collaborative environment for everything and differentiate themselves from Google Drive. It is much easier to see who did what and when in git and any file type is possible. There is no good way to do file compare on some file types within GitHub, but that could be fixed. The loss of seeing the edits that other people make in near-real-time is probably no big deal.
I know that's funny money pre-IPO valuation, but come on guys, why isn't ANYONE saying "it's the dotcom bubble all over again, run! Save your investments!" Most of us lived through the first dotcom bubble and watched the market for anything technology related go insane, then collapse completely. It's going to happen again.
Github is cool right now because it's at the nexus of these social media startups, that's it. It's a useful tool, sure, but trying a silly idea like "making everyone a coder" just sounds like pets.com 23-year-old CEO hubris again. I guess I just don't see the allure of working 80-hour weeks banging out webmonkey code for yet another phone app, but that's exactly what's going to happen when these new "coders" enter the world of work and find out it's not all that exciting for the most part.
I'd much rather see advances in semiconductor technology or energy conservation or space exploration than Yet Another Social App pushing ads to eyeballs...there's better places to spend money.
"On the Traffic and Chaos Teams at Netflix, our mission requires that we have a holistic understanding of our complex microservice architecture." ref
I seem to recall a similar sentiment with QBASIC? I played with QBASIC. Yes, yes I am ashamed. However, give me a few days and I can code poorly in any language I've tried. And, trust me, it's awful.
Needless to say, my foray into QBASIC was not long-lived. C it was. Eventually, I was able to hire professionals. They despised me and eventually asked me to stop helping. I complied because, you know, that's why I hired them. Actual quote, pretty much verbatim: "Code comments get commented out, in the code, and not written on soggy, coffee soaked, index cards." Another, "What does this 'I'm too drunk' button actually do?" (I actually had a plan, a bad plan but a plan regardless, for that button. It never made it to production. Also, I was drunk.)
There's a reason I "help" certain FOSS groups financially instead of with code or even attempts to report bugs or fix bugs. I'm pretty sure I'd not actually be helping except for some loose definition of help. "I'm a big helper now!"
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Because the only thing holding average people back from becoming programmers is source control.
And I've never used GitHub.
Even when management can't do it, Visual Basic can cause trouble simply because they know about it. I was once paid to create a huge abortion of a personnel/resource tracking application inside of Excel, where the managers could each work on a sheet and then through the magic of VBA, upper management could combine all of the data, query Exchange for personnel data, and then make pivot tables. I tried to talk him out of it, but he insisted - so I made it.
He got fired, but the behemoth lives on. For a while I would get asked to help debug it, as it was delicate. Eventually they had me hand it off to this poor bastard in IT, but as far as I know they are still using it.
To my delight, Dilbert published this strip right in the middle of it all.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
... on not introducing toxic Codes of Conduct that split apart your community and are downright bigoted in order to push a particular agenda ?
Won't have to "make" new developers if you don't chase your existing ones away.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
I don't see anything saying how they plan to turn everyone into developers. It looks like they just plan to get as many people on the platform as possible. How does that make them into developers? Throwing out a bunch of code (that may or may not be any good) that anyone can use does not make them developers. In fact it makes the problem worse. We already have too many cut and paste coders. Or ones who are addicted to frameworks and other libraries and can't solve even a simple problem without them. You want people to be developers, teach them to think logically and write code!
I seem to recall a similar sentiment with QBASIC? I played with QBASIC. Yes, yes I am ashamed.
Don't be. I've seen it used to do real work from code that was bashed together in a moment, such as for analyzing captured IR sensor data to determine the coding. The problems come when people expect people to maintain their little BASIC tools, or flesh them out into more complete projects. It would make more sense to reinvent them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They hit that point like Shenmue on the Dreamcast, the only way to be profitable is if everyone bought two copies...
They have hit market saturation. They've got the coke brand recognition, and to keep getting this insane VC funding they need to turn git into something everyone can and will use.
There simply isn't enough programmers to sustain them.
But programming is simple! A child can do it! Why, just the other day my little nephew Marvin showed me a program that makes a box move around on the screen why going "boop! boop! boop!". Then little Cindy showed me the website she made full of pony pictures! With kittens!
Agreed. I've been around a while and see this claim re-pop up every 5 or so years in a different dress.
The closest I ever saw it happening on a large scale was Lotus 1-2-3 (spreadsheet) keyboard macros that mirrored the Lotus menu key shortcuts (letters). With the "if" function and a goto-cell option, it became Turing Complete.
The key to success was that it leveraged something users already knew:
1. The menu letters (it was the DOS days), the equivalent of API calls.
2. Formulas. Accountant types gotta know those.
3. Cells: They were the reference-able equiv of programming statements and sometimes parameters.
Frameworks, API's, and environment setups make "regular" programming too much a keep-up-or-don't-bother profession.
However, power-user semi-programming tools like Query-By-Example, and Boolean and set handling rule-based engines like those found in desktop MS-Outlook's message handling/routing tool can provide near-programming capability to power users. MS actually did I pretty good job on that, I have to say. But, I don't see it in wide use; less than 5% of office users I'd guess.
One can also write an entire small-scale CRUD app in MS-Access having up to about 7 tables without a single line of code (other than maybe a conditional filter as found in a WHERE clause). It's not polished, but generally works.
Also, one does have to know a bit about relational modelling in terms of 1-to-many, many-to-many, etc. Just about any non-trivial data tooler has to understand those to avoid duplicating info etc. (basic normalization and relational integrity).
It's one of the things "hobby" programmers often get snagged on because it may not become a clear-cut problem until later. Since they are often the initial user themselves, they just learn to be careful in data entry to prevent certain duplication problems when the data set is small. I think "programming" education should cover basic data factoring and relationships. It's not just about "knowing commands".
Managers who monitor tracking reports and summary statistics often don't get data factoring either, asking for contradictory business rules. Thus, data factoring knowledge would help more than just programmers. The "coder" push in schools is too narrow.
Table-ized A.I.
BASIC gets a bad rep primarily based on older versions of BASIC. Older BASIC didn't have any support for structured programming. Every line had a line number (just as every instruction has an address, because that's the abstraction that people designing it were comfortable with). There was no stack, no scoping. Flow control worked solely by GOTO {line number} statements (and you could do truly evil things with it, because the line number could be computed).
By the time QuickBASIC (and QBASIC, the cut-down version that MS gave away for free, which lacked the compiler) came alone, BASIC had support for subroutines, call and return (by subroutine name), and scoped variables, and typically didn't use line numbers. It wasn't a bad teaching language, as it did contain all of the basic concepts needed for structured programming.
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No, they feel having successfully conflated git (the software) and their service in the minds of investors/the public/a helluva-a-lot of developers is worth 2 billion.
You know, all that value Linus left on the table for the good of mankind.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Back in the day (like around 1960) COBOL was going to remove the need for programmers. Programming would be so easy the management could do it. You know what happened.
Management has been trying to come up with some way to get along without us pesky programmers for over fifty years. We don't dress management-professional, we get paid too much money, we typically have to be treated as individuals, and we don't act like nice corporate drones.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
There are mooooore than one of us, though I don't do it AC.