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Ask Slashdot: Is Computing As Cool and Fun As It Once Was?
dryriver writes: I got together with old computer nerd friends the other day. All of us have been at it since the 8-bit/1980s days of Amstrad, Atari, Commodore 64-type home computers. Everybody at the meeting agreed on one thing -- computing is just not as cool and as much fun as it once was. One person lamented that computer games nowadays are tied to internet DRM like Steam, that some crucial DCC software is available to rent only now (e.g. Photoshop) and that many "basic freedoms" of the old-school computer nerd are increasingly disappearing. Another said that Windows 10's spyware aspects made him give up on his beloved PC platform and that he will use Linux and Android devices only from now on, using consoles to game on instead of a PC because of this. A third complained about zero privacy online, internet advertising, viruses, ransomware, hacking, crapware. I lamented that the hardware industry still hasn't given us anything resembling photorealistic realtime 3D graphics, and that the current VR trend arrived a full decade later than it should have. A point of general agreement was that big tech companies in particular don't treat computer users with enough respect anymore. What do Slashdotters think? Is computing still as cool and fun as it once was, or has something "become irreversibly lost" as computing evolved into a multi-billion dollar global business?
Because of Windows spying?
LMAO.
Back in the day, someone dedicated could learn everything he had about a system, from the CPU, registers, RAM, I/O, video, etc. It was relatively simple.
The only way to get that same "cool and fun" feeling is to dive into the 8-bit microcontrollers such as the ATmega328P. Even the latest Arduinos have become too complex with their ARM SoC.
Look on hackaday.com, there's often fun projects based on those basic, entry-level, sub-100MHz 8-bit uC.
Switch to Linux and the cool factor becomes very much alive.
If you're a gamer, you are going to be forever at the mercy of the game companies, who are going to exploit their customers to some extent to maximize profit.
If you are a hacker, you have your own hacker-produced computing platforms and tools and a wide-open vista of hardware and physical objects that can now be designed and manufactured by the individual.
If you depend on some company to make everything you use, you've set yourself up to be their "client". Don't do that.
Bruce Perens.
> many "basic freedoms" of the old-school computer nerd are increasingly disappearing
There is an organization devoted to computer freedom called the Free Software Foundation, closely allied with GNU. GNU makes most of the operating system we call Linux.
> Software is available to rent only now (e.g. Photoshop)
There are several alternatives to Photoshop which use free licenses, meaning licensees that respect freedom. None of them do everything Photoshop does in the exact same way Photoshop does it, but for any *particular* Photoshop user, there's probably a free software package that fits their particular needs well.
> Windows 10's spyware aspects made him give up on his beloved PC platform and that he will use Linux
Linux is certainly one way to avoid Windows built-in spyware.
> viruses, ransomware, hacking, crapware
That's 99% Windows too, Linux desktop users see viruses and malware very, very rarely - maybe once every 15 years.
Linux isn't perfect. It does however address most of the concerns mentioned.
I have this conversation periodically, except it is usually addressed to music, art, tv, sports, or any of a number of topics. It's like those guys who see a high school girl now and say "Man, they did not look like that back in my day".. yes, they did. It's just that when you saw them then, you didn't see a cute blond, you saw the B***h from social studies.
There are many exciting things going on now. I am looking at how quickly and massively raspberry pi's have been moving into area where their creators never thought they would be used. I see arduinos and the maker movement and think "Wow". Just a look at adafruit or any of a hundred other sites and the amount of very affordable tech is staggering. We could stop all tech development now and it would be centuries before we explore all the possibilities of what is sitting on the desk in front of us.
I met someone at a coffee shop awhile back and there was a bunch of teenagers acting like teenagers. My friend is now in their mid-30's. I am in my 50's. I had first met them when they were a teenager at a coffee shop. My friend commented that they were not like that back then and I pointed out that I was their current age when we first met and yes.. my friend was just as dumb and teenagery back then.
Excitement is never external. You can look at any family pic taken at Disneyland and see the scowling goth kid who is totally not having fun. OK. You have given up windows as the programming platform and gone to Linux and Android.. So? You did not start programming on Windows. You started on other platforms and moved with the times.
But, that is not what you are complaining about..
What catches my attention is that *none* of your computing complaints are really computing complaints. They are consumer complaints. You should not be doing this comparison back to their early 80's equivalents.. televisions with 3 channels. Radio. Vinyl records. Newspapers. Magazines. Computing is more than fine right now. It completely rocks. Consumer products are far greater than what they were.
I have thought the same thing.
Of course there are a few fundamental differences between then and now from my point of view:
1. I was a young teen and had tons of time (and energy) on my hands to play with these things.
2. Everything you learned you figured out on your own or as a group share with close friends, supplemented with a few manuals and magazines.
3. The hardware was finite enough you could basically learn everything from the low level access to the hardware to all the software features (basic or machine language). You could literally learn what every location in IO or memory did (53281 anyone??).
4. With a few days or at most weeks time with even modest skill levels you could put together something that could "wow" your friends and perhaps even non-computer family members.
5. Atari / TI / Commodore computer overnight parties where a bunch of us get together to compete to show off the best games etc. in an attempt to prove we had the best platform.
Today we have a lot more learning resources out there, and the hardware is much more powerful but in my mind it just isn't as fun. There is certainly no way to whip up something that would "wow" anyone. It's more a tool now than a fun hobby.
Declining SAT scores were a big topic of discussion in the 80s and 90s, but what most people never really took into account was that in the 50s most jobs only required a high school diploma; by the 80s more people felt they needed to have a college degree. The decline in scores didn't reflect a decline in ability of graduating high schoolers, it reflected more of the lower-performing graduates taking the test.
I've been in the computing field for a long time. When I went into it back in the early 80s most people had never seen a computer. There were a very small number of people who worked with computers, and I'd say about half of them were doing at least moderately interesting stuff. Today there are many many more people doing interesting stuff, it's just that the growth in interesting work has been swamped by a rising ocean of mindless, bureaucratic IT drone work.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Take application development. Pioneering has been replaced by engineering. Great for making complicated and reliable products, not so great for empowerment of the individual. Software engineering tends to be teamwork. Depending on how "standard" the required end product is you can parcel out the interface design, the overall apllication design, the datastructures, the core algorithms, data management, and housekeeping. Could be 3-50 software engineers in a team. Used to be 1 programmer doing all of that.
Take high-performance programming. It used to be an art. Found e.g. in DOD stuff, scientific software, and games. Often in assembler, for speed. Nowadays that's mostly out. Certainly for scientific software. You use compilers of even scripting languages that call libraries to do the heavy lifting. You're quite unlikely to do better than the library builders. If you're writing some really new algorithm, you'll code it in C/C++. If absolutely necessary, you can make that code tunable (array stride, blocksize, etc.) and write an algorithm to optimise those parameters for your specific hardware (like e.g. BLAS). If it's too slow, buy better hardware. If it's still too slow, get access to a Hadoop cluster and parallelise your algorithm.
Take datacommunication. In the early days datacommunication meant controlling some UART and sending squiggles down a wire. Now it's calling a packaged protocol stack and talking to the appropriate protocol layers. More often than not that's the connection or session layer or higher ... unless you are a specialised networking engineer.
As for computer users as clients: the nerdy types are dying out. What today's consumer wants is things like smartphones and tablets. And what do they want it for? To surf the web (shopping, news, amusement (e.g. video torrents, Youtube)), and to waste time on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and various chats. If they somehow want a desktop computer, they'll only know it for the OS it runs. That would be "Windows" or "Apple" (meaning macOs, but Apple users typically don't know that). And that's what the industry is giving them. Want "Basic Freddoms" ? Bugger off and run Linux, you freak.
So, yes. Computing as a product has become commoditised and geared towards the mass market. It's not easy to turn a buck by catering for nerds: the real money is in serving customers. And it shows. Consumer-grade users get a consumer-grade experience plus consumer-grade treatment (read: DRM, spyware, bloatware).
Those who want to play around with a computer however never had it better. For less than 50$ you can get a complete Raspberry Pi system (or a lookalike) that's more powerful than a clunky old PC. For 500$ you can get performance you used to have only on workstations, and for 1500$ you can get the same power you used to need a supercomputer for.
The only thing stopping you is know-how, time and interest. But that's not the industry's fault,
It is doubtful young people are writing that kind of stuff. It is much harder to write software than it ever was. It used to be fun writing "Hello World" but that won't keep the interest of young people today because they are used to much more sophisticated software.
Replying here partly in agreement but mostly in wonder about the OP's AC status. If your ideas or opinions are so bad that you don't want to associate your name (or even a handle) with them, then why bother to post at all? I'd make an exception for cases where you are saying something with possible repercussions, but I'm not seeing it in the OP of this thread. (In a sense, it's moot, since my settings render the ACs nearly invisible. It was the quote in the visible reply that exposed this AC.) Incidentally, it doesn't matter in terms of protecting privacy. Slashdot knows who you are, and surely you can't trust the sanctity of your personal information as stored on Slashdot.
Now what's the agreeing part? In the days of yore computers were within the scope of understanding of a single person. The systems were still small enough that it was at least theoretically possible to understand all of how they worked. I thought that was really fun and cool, even if I never got there I enjoyed the chase. I caught just the tail end of that period.
Not sure when the transition happened, but at this time there is clearly no hope of understanding everything about any "normal" machine. Both the hardware and software have passed the human scope of understanding or control. No one has time to look at billions and billions of transistors or millions and millions of lines of code. We have to abstract, and picking your level of abstraction is not the same as understanding the entire thing.
There's also a level of threat and paranoia that cuts into the fun. Maybe part of that is a result of getting old, but I think it is mostly just a matter of experience and understanding my own limitations. I really don't want to be pwned, but all it would take is one juicy vulnerability, and I'm sure the serious black-hat hackers can find one if'n they want to. If a serious hacker is coming for me, I might as well save both of us the trouble and just turn over my passwords now, eh? The best defense is having nothing worth hacking for?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
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What this guy said.... The barrier to entry for nerdy children is much higher now then it was for me. The sole saving grace for them is the open source community and vast availability of examples and information. But even then, you still need multiple skillsets with graphic design, code, data, story/purpose. Microcontrollers and SBC like Arduino and Pi's making IOT devices is the best way to amaze now.
computing, music, whatever was better back in the day.
No, it wasn't better. It was much, much worse. It was so rudimentary you could actually start at:
10 PRINT "Hello World"
20 GOTO 10
There's no doubt that a chain saw is far superior to a hand saw. But if I was interested in saw-making and how saws work it'd be an awfully lot easier to build a hand saw from scratch, all the way down to forging the blade, fitting the handle and giving it teeth. In fact it's often an inverse relationship between how hard it is to make and how hard it is to use, like an automatic gearbox is more complex than a manual gearbox. As progress means that we build more and more advanced and complex solutions, the more it is out of reach for the hobbyist. I could almost make something similar to commercial games on the C64 because many of them were actually written by one man in a garage. Today you look at $100 million dollar titles and realize that even if you did this professionally you'd be one little cog in a very big wheel.
It's in the nature of advanced civilization, we're all doing a very small part. I depend on other people to produce the food I eat, the clothes I wear, the hot and cold running water, the electricity, the car and the roads etc. and all I do really is program computers and trade for everything else. That means I know a lot about that and very little about the rest. Or I could train for the post-apocalyptic society were I have to survive using whatever crude means I can pull off on my own, but life is short. I think I'll just take my chances and if shit hits the fan contribute to the rapid de-population back to an agrarian society.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
IT landscape is pain in the ass if you are seeking for a motivating programming job. Usually, large companies buy products to do almost everything. What is left is customization to your particular business or enterprise. In this arena, the software vendors are making huge efforts to make the interface as boring as they can since "easy to customize" is a major selling point. They want to tell your boss your work can be done by a monkey, so they make it that way. Some are having graphical interfaces which at the end of the day happen to be more time consuming than an standard API in any language a good programmer can take advantage of.
A fool with a tool is still a fool. So, they hire monkeys to play with the graphical programming interface and they produce shitty code because it is so easy to add layers and layers of shit over shit. Then they wonder why that beast they paid many hundred thousand dollars is working so slow and so bad.
All the fun is at home.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Yeah. This.
There is so much fun around. Yeah, there's also the mundane and the boring stuff, too. People have bills to pay, and sometimes being a meaningless dweeb is how the lights stay on.
But there's never been more real fun. If you don't like code projects for Big Corp, you can get into the mad crazy fun of Arduino, Pi, FPGAs, robotics. SoCs, SDRs, and a myriad other interesting projects.
I've been around since doing 6502s and Z80s in assembler. It's necessary to peel off the layers of cruft and mold that get into one's system when you sit still too long. Coding for secure, optimized code has been increasingly crazy, but if you know your platforms, go for it.
I watch kids doing fascinating things. Truly sophisticated toys that twenty years ago were impossible at any price. My only fear: letting people get controlled by the advertisers and the government, each of whom are power hungry and relentless. Otherwise, if you're bored, break out of your box.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Computers are a lot more expensive.
Cost of an IBM PC in 1983: $4000.
Cost of a Raspberry Pi in 2016: $29.
The Raspberry Pi is several orders of magnitude faster, and comes with WAY more free development software.
Forget compiled languages. That's not fun.
We want command based (imperative) languages that can be run in a REPL for fun. BASIC basically fits this.
Take Python as a contemporary example. Now look at how many basic features of interactivity are NOT enabled in an easy way in Python by default: LOCATE, INKEY, SOUND, PLAY, SCREEN, PSET, LINE, CIRCLE, PGET.
Just these. You can't do ANY of these things in Python with a basic install. "Yes," if you have tkinter in your install, you kind of can. But it's hairy and complex. It's not anywhere near as simple or accessible as BASIC. Pygmy makes some of these things possible, but those are further steps of installation away, and the interactivity feels further away.
Line numbers are incredibly simple (read: understandable) as a flow control model. "Why Johnny Can't Code" outlined the problem with mandatory complex abstract control structures.
I think there are basic fundamental missing pieces in the contemporary programming environment, and that the industry is worse for it.
Back in the day we were writing more challenging programs than "Hello, World!". I personally wrote custom parsers, real-time control software (on a PDP/11 running RSTS/E), a numerous problems requiring serious algorithm design. A lot of what I did would be easy to do today because of a combination of computing power, rich libraries, and scripting languages, but doing it all yourself in C with nothing but the (then much smaller) standard library made it pretty interesting.
The big difference is how much closer you felt to the bare iron back in the day. Today we work in the context largely of other peoples' frameworks and libraries. If I had to draw an analogy it'd be like voting in a town meeting in a small frontier town, and voting as a citizen in a republic with a hundred million citizens. In which case do you have the most power? It's not a straightforward question. In a small town you can shape policy in a way you can't in large republic, but you're limited by the limitations of that town itself. You can vote to put a man on the Moon, but it's not going to happen.
The important thing to realize is that as you get older, you just don't have as much fun, pretty much across the board. You have to cultivate playfulness because it doesn't come as naturally as it once did. When I hear people middle aged or older (like myself) pining for a lost past, it's often clear to me that what they're mourning is the loss of their youth.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.