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50 years after Basic, most users still can't or won't program anything (www.zdnet.com)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

Smartphones – and to a lesser degree, tablets – kind of are not a phenomenal programming platform.

[…]

But not everyone in 1990 had a personal computer, and I would venture to say that the group that did probably was not a representative sample of the population. I’d give decent odds that a lower proportion of the population as a whole could program in 1990 than today.

Yeah, and these things influence each other. Today we have a networked computer in our pockets, and depending on where you live, they may or may not be required or the standard way to do tasks like get a bus ticket, login to government websites so you can do your taxes and whatnot, transfer money, and a bunch of other tasks that to a degree are really sensitive.

So as we have a bunch of barely computer-literate people functionally dependent on these devices, we also need them to be locked down and secure. MS had some grand thoughts about "code everywhere", which turns out is pretty awful security-wise, especially with gullible networked users. The users in this community have very different capabilities and needs than the users who might not even want a computer, but feel forced to get one because the government stopped using paper and bank and post offices no longer exist. (This is, essentially, what it's like in modern Norway. We might be ending home delivery of snail mail soon; mail delivery every other weekday seems to be an unnecessary expense.) Beyond the lack of a keyboard, the platform has a bunch of constraints that don't make for fun computing, but they absolutely need to be there. Unfortunately we also wind up with a split between the common restricted platforms, and the casual, customizable platforms, and not everybody gets to be exposed to the latter.

There are probably, in absolute numbers, a whole lot more people who know js or Python than people who knew BASIC in the 80s. In addition there are people who are pretty good at spreadsheet programming, and other tasks that are essentially coding, even if they're not listed as regular programming languages.