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Will The Death of the PC Bring 'An End To Openness'? (infoworld.com)

Slashdot reader snydeq shared "11 Predictions For the Future of Programming" by InfoWorld's contributing editor -- and one prediction was particularly dire: The passing of the PC isn't only the slow death of a particular form factor. It;s the dying of a particularly open and welcoming marketplace... Consoles are tightly locked down. No one gets into that marketplace without an investment of capital. The app stores are a bit more open, but they're still walled gardens that limit what we can do. Sure, they are still open to programmers who jump through the right hoops but anyone who makes a false move can be tossed...

For now, most of the people reading this probably have a decent desktop that can compile and run code, but that's slowly changing. Fewer people have the opportunity to write code and share it. For all of the talk about the need to teach the next generation to program, there are fewer practical vectors for open code to be distributed.

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  1. Re: False premise by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    When I have kids, one of the things that they will learn is how to assemble their own computer. Including, not calling the fucking processor a CPU. I'm not sure when that became acceptable, but the CPU is the box part of the desktop with all those boards, chips and disks. And not referring to storage as memory unless it's a memory card.

    It's no wonder millenials keep "inventing" things that have been around for decades, nobody is teaching them the history of computing with any meaningful accuracy.