[IIAOPSW]

I'm going to say something a bit controversial here.

Most people are not creative. Its true. There isn't some horde of people who want to program but don't know it yet because they own a tablet instead of a computer. There isn't some horde of musicians that will never know it because their music comes from an mp3 instead of their own instrument. There isn't some horde of artists who will never know it because their images come from a camera instead of owning a paintbrush. Heck even on a web-forum where contributing content is as low friction as sharing links, only ~10% of users do it. And only 10% of that 10% actually make the content that's posted. 90% of people are happy to passively consume content.

I wish the author were right. I wish there was this huge hidden demand for a real computer revolution. I still think that when I buy a device I should actually own it (which entails freedom to modify). But let's face it idealistic nerd types. We lost. Most people are consumers not creators. Get over it, go to work, program for them, and wipe away your tears with a stack of money.

[TeMPOraL]

I disagree. Children are a good argument against this (actually, teenagers are even better - children go to play piano, but it's teenagers who make quite a big part of the content on the Internet), but you can stretch it even further - generally people have dreams and hobbies, they just don't have the time/capacity for advancing them. It's easy to paint "general population" as a bunch of mindless zombies, but think of any person you spent more than few hours interacting with in the physical world. Even the most stereotypical GenPop member. You'll discover that they have their idiosyncrasies and do lots of little creative things (and dream of doing more).

(Also note that some popular activities are creative even though we don't usually think of them this way; cooking is no less creative than web development or graphics design, and lots of people do creative side projects when e.g. baking gifts for friends, or throwing a party.)

I see having to work for a living as a biggest obstacle to creativity. For most people, their job takes most of their time and energy. After that, commute, making dinner and doing maintenance tasks, there's so little time and energy left that it's no surprise people are not very creative, and opt to watch TV or go to a bar instead. We're being forced out of creativity and into consumerism. I believe that things like Universal Basic Income are worth it because they could reverse this situation.

[sam_goody]

I disagree. As soon as it became as easy to create video as it was to draw, people created video content, not just consumed it. When sharing (youtube) was easy, the levels of creation have grown unbounded.

The amount of media in all forms that is being created today is astounding. That's digital drawing

If coding was as easy as writing we would find at least as much growth there. I know dozens of people who have ideas that would try to code, if it was as conceptually easy for them to do as is writing a memoir.

Such a revolution could definitely happen.

[sanderjd]

Is programming really harder than writing a memoir? It seems to be the other way around to me.

[noname123]

IMHO,

Coding a simple mainentence script is equal to writing a diary entry.

Coding a CRUD web app is as hard as writing an average short story in a college writing class.

Coding an app that uses heavily system programming principles, concurrency and networking probably equal to MFA level creative writing and so on...

[PakG1]

Unfortunately, unless there is data to examine, this is only a platitude. When I survey the landscape, I'll tend to agree with the parent. Yes, there's been an explosion of content. But there's also been an explosion of consumers. Parent probably pulled the ratio out of thin air, but I'd say his point stands. The explosion of consumers is enough to handle the explosion of producers (and even the so-called prosumers). Honestly, you can count the number of YouTube stars out there with probably five digits, maybe even four. Compare that with annual YouTube views and passive accounts.

[mchaver]

I'm not sure if there is any data to back it up, but I remember reading somewhere that the average American adult is less likely to casually partake in sports or music (compared to maybe 100 years ago) based on the perception that they wouldn't be good as a professional athlete or musician because of constant exposure to experts via television, MP3s, youtube, etc. Music and sports are seen as something that kids or experts do, and programming is mostly for experts. I think any important issue to resolve is how do we change the thought pattern and convince people that it is acceptable to do these activities without being an professional/expert?

[danenania]

I have to strongly disagree. Humans are innately creative--just watch any child play if you doubt this.

What many people lack is not creativity, but the confidence and skills to creatively express themselves. The majority of people do not have that spark they were born with nurtured, they have it squashed.

[mercer]

Childhood is my go-to argument in favor of 'everyone is creative'. I've not talked to a single person who wasn't highly creative as a child, and just realizing that makes me sad sometimes.

[consz]

I've never been convinced by that argument. Looking back on my memories as a child, I wouldn't call myself creative -- I think that's something that I've developed as I've grown older, not something I was born with. Certainly, to a degree, children are curious, but that seems largely out of necessity (to learn e.g. language so you can express anything, not necessarily something creative).

[goodJobWalrus]

Are you a guy?

As a girl, every girl I knew created imaginary worlds for her dolls, drew, and made things (for the dolls mostly).

Is there anything like that, that little boys create (before they get into computers and video games)?. I'm pregnant with a boy right now actually, would love to know what I can do to encourage creativity from the earliest age.

[selllikesybok]

Absolutely! Boys do the same with their dolls. :) I spent countless hours crafting physical things (block forts, mostly) and fantastical backdrops for different generations of "action figures". From 9-10 my go to was an elaborate mythology developed around Micro Machines and dinosaur figurines. Something about dead race drivers reincarnating as sentient dinos in an alternate universe, IIRC.

I was never very good at drawing, but evidence shows I did scribble a lot.

My son loved to draw, and is still pretty good but seems less interested since his early teens. He, too, spent long hours with his different dolls, in addition to the video games.

I'd say so the same things as for a girl, honestly. Provide opportunities to draw/paint/sculpt/make noise. They will do so. :)

I think it's more around school ages that things change more. And puberty, or course.

[eli_gottlieb]

My brother and I had an elaborately worked-out story and setting for our Nintendo-themed plush dolls that mostly reflected our exposure to Dragonball Z in afternoon/early-morning cartoon blocks.

In fact, it was slightly more aware of its own genre conventions than DBZ ever achieved.

Of course, we had loads and loads of free time back then. Why, I had so much free time back then, I could spend time trying to write my own pathetically hand-crafted D3D8 game engine and play with dolls with my brother, all in the same week!

Compare to adulthood, in which I'm lucky to combine going to the gym, basic household tasks, and accomplishing 5 hours of hobby-stuff in a single week of outside-work time.

[TeMPOraL]

Look back at your teenage memories too. Personally, I was more consciously creative then.

[sparkie]

Most adults are consumers, but children are curious. You're looking at the wrong group if you think any kind of revolution will happen among the current generations.

When people argue that not everyone needs to learn to program, I contrast it to the idea that not everyone needs to learn to read. If you imagine the demand for competent readers before the printing press, it would be a similar situation to the demand for programming skill now. The ability for us all to read and share information is what has led to rapid progress. Imagine doing science without publishing text, but instead, all of our scientific ideas needed to be expressed in words and gestures, via conferences. Such thing just can't scale to the level it needs to be to have any progress. You simply can't do science without the ability to read and write.

It's becoming clear now that you can't do science without the ability to program too. Computers are a far more powerful medium for sharing ideas than text. When we use only text, to find anything of relevance in a big body of it, the author needs to write an "index" and map page numbers to alphabetically sorted words. He needs to manually update that index when the text is revised. (Fortunately, most papers are written with software which does this automatically now, but papers without hyperlinked contents/indexes are still abundant). In schools, children are taught the basic skills they need to do this, but little more which could accelerate their ability to share ideas.

We need to start thinking of programming ability as a core basic skill, among language, math, science and humanities. Most of it can be taught via math, language and science, and it would give children, who are naturally creative, a skill which they can use for absolutely anything. The idea that you learn to program to get a job as a programmer is a complete nonsense argument, it's like suggesting everyone learns to write so they can become authors.

[random_upvoter]

Most young people don't want to become good at programming in the same way that most young people have no desire to become good at mathematics. They just don't want to shove their minds into that straightjacket of strict logical thought. It's naturally abhorrent to them.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Programming is a specialised trade like carpentry or metal working or ship building.

Of course you can build things with it. That's what specialised trades are for.

That doesn't mean everyone needs to learn how to be a carpenter or a brick layer or a mechanic or an architect. Most people just aren't interested, and even if they are, they don't have the mindset for it - never mind the time.

There may eventually be a way to get AI to the stage where people can "program" by telling an AI what they want, and leaving it to the AI to work out the details.

But that's a long way off. (Amazon's Echo is probably the closest thing for the moment.)

For now, the idea that most of the population is itching to play with build systems and scripting languages, or that their lives and/or brains would be improved by same, is pure fantasy.

[eli_gottlieb]

>When people argue that not everyone needs to learn to program, I contrast it to the idea that not everyone needs to learn to read.

Programming is active/productive. Reading is semi-active/consumptive. The proper analogy would be the idea that everyone needs to learn to write well.

[vlehto]

I slightly disagree. About half of the creative people with math knack can't code.

When I was in high school, the advanced math class had ~two types of people. People good at arithmetics and functions and people good at geometry and functions. People who we're good at arithmetics but weren't good at functions dropped out quickly.

Go to engineering school and you will find software people who thing about graphics as an afterthought. They remember numbers and words easily, enjoy squashing bugs. And they are good with function like ideas, that turn into programs. Like search engines, text editors, finding primes and brute forcing passwords. (I don't know really as I don't belong to their tribe.)

Then there are construction and mechanical engineering students. They won't code voluntarily, because they are crap at it. "What the fuck did I name that thing? How many steps should this while loop do?" Just doesn't compute. Yet these people can manage pretty massive concept design and 3D models and whatnot. CAD work is fun to them, unlike most CS majors. I'm one of that group. While I can do small programs in Python, I don't enjoy what I'm capable of doing. Learning more seems futile, as I will never be actually good at it.

This divide into two groups shows in later life too. Just check the prices of decent CAD tools, and compare them to decent IDEs. For some reason people who are able to enjoy both CAD and coding are incredibly rare. And that makes them very valuable.

If you could make graphic, grown up and powerful language, that would tap pretty huge resource of brain power. Currently it might happen as some sort of hydraulic simulation tool or autolisp plug to Autocad.

[smoyer]

I'm going to take a more middle-of-the-road view - Some people are not creative.

I think the main problem with the computer revolution (if defined by everyone programming) is that many people don't like to program. Even those who could learn are really trying to accomplish something else as their primary task. Commercial and bespoke software is a faster way to get to work on their primary task.

[InclinedPlane]

Creativity isn't a trait, it's a skill. It can be learned like any other.

[hacknat]

I would agree with you that most adults are not creative, as it gets knocked out of them at a certain age. We live in a failure averse society and as soon as a child feels embarrassed by a failure they went through it's pretty much game over for them for whatever that failure related to.

I would tend to agree that there is a dirth of painters, musicians, etc in the world. Of my close friends only two of us can play a musical instrument. I think I have to agree with you that easily accessible programming is never going to result in lots of people programming.

In a lot of ways universal programming has gone about as far as it will go. Learning how to program (let me be clear, I do not mean learning how to be a good software engineer) now is actually easier, IMO, than learning a musical instrument. Of my closest friends, two of us play a musical instrument, but three of us program: there's me, the SE, my friend who is an Urban Planner and knows GIS software and R really well, and my other friend who is a patho-biologist and knows Python and R.

[based2]

All, we need is harmonized interfaces for users customization like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResEdit (Let users change the ressources: images, sounds, texts - for translations, improvements).

[vixen99]

I wish I could be so confident about what 'there isn't'. There's no demand for a real computer revolution in the same way there was "no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of DEC

[jamesrcole]

> I wish there was this huge hidden demand for a real computer revolution.

When has there ever been a huge hidden demand for revolutionary technological developments?