[acdha]

This feels pessimistic to me: most people didn’t learn the web that way, instead using shared servers — and there were plenty of similar complaints that it was too hard to learn Unix/Windows admin stuff, too. Today, you can use glitch, github pages, jsbin & a million friends, zeit, etc. or the same cheap Dreamhost account people used $20 years ago and start practicing with HTTPS and many other amenities at minimal cost. JavaScript CDNs make it pretty easy to use a ton of stuff without even needing to learn how to install it, too, and increasingly you can do that as native modules.

I’d worry a lot more about how many people are being told they need a J2EE-scale tool chain to run hello world even though the native environment has never been richer.

[mort96]

I have to imagine the "just open a .html file and start playing" route is a huge vector for getting people into proper programming. I know it's what both I and my brother did. Maybe you don't agree, but I think it's a horrible shame that we're making that route less and less possible by disabling features for anything other than HTTPS.

Glitch honestly looks really good, but I'm a bit worried about telling people that the way to learn programming is to rely on a random for-profit corporation's computers rather than letting people realize the actual power they have over their own machine.

[inferiorhuman]

I have to imagine the "just open a .html file and start playing" route is a huge vector for getting people into proper programming.

It may be, but just open an HTML file and write an app using your camera and microphone is not something that is typically the result of doing just that (nor should it be).

Putting some effort into figuring out how the pieces fit together is not a bad thing. You can still set up HTTPS if need be without having to rely on a for-profit corporation. It's trivial to install a self-signed cert in iOS and OSX the last I checked (and I seem to remember it wasn't so hard in Windows either). It was excruciatingly bad in Android (well, mostly missing IIRC) around Gingerbread — but that too is a good example of why using products built by people with no comprehension of how to secure things is bad.

A learning curve is not inherently bad, but beyond that, especially with something that has such huge security implications, some understanding of WHY you should be encrypting camera fees is something I'd want any dev working on a camera/audio recording app to understand. There's a reason that while CB radio is easily accessible, there are barriers to entry for Hams. With power comes responsibility.

[rswail]

"just open a .html file and start playing" is a route to making web pages, not get people into programming.

If they do want to get into programming, Scratch and other learning DEs and/or node/js are much better paths than dealing with the layers of barnacles that have accrued over HTML to get to the OPA / Webasm / TS/JS etc "web programming" environments.

.NET and VSCode are free downloads, provide a managed environment, and C# is a good imperative language to start with. It also supports F# if you want to get into functional programming.

[xg15]

I find "it's ok if the platform becomes worse because there are so many third-party services you can use" not a compelling argument.

(Not to mention, you need to get to know the services in the first place, while a browser is directly accessible to you)

[acdha]

How did the platform become worse when this is a new capability which didn’t used to be part of the platform? Similarly, while it’s true that you need to know services exist, that’s never been easier just as the documentation, available guides, and especially the developer tools have never been better for someone learning.

I’m not entirely in love with the needs driving this decision but I think it’s reasonable to make security and privacy decisions which benefit a billion people at the expense of making certain tasks slightly harder for a much smaller group.