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by bipin_nag 1969 days ago
>JS didn't lower the barrier to programming at all. >But I disagree about lowering the barrier for developers.

I think OP meant it as browsers that run JS. The built in console is so useful for testing/practice. You can run JS without any setup on most popular OS - Win/Linux/Mac.

You can practice JS in console while viewing YouTube tutorial or following a JS blog/ Mozilla dev page.
1 comments
fauigerzigerk 1969 days ago
I know that's what they meant, but I disagree that it lowered the barrier to creating actual applications or to getting into programming.

Everyone who had MS Office installed back in the 1990s (which was basically everyone) could easily run some quick VB code to try things.

But the difference was that you could also create proper applications with a UI, a database and (optionally!) some glue code.

We just had no good way of distributing our apps. Creating anything collaborative that wasn't restricted to a local network was exceedingly difficult as well.

The Web fixed all that, albeit at the cost of cratering developer productivity, a massive increase in complexity and higher barriers to entry for new devs.

And if you're asking me why the number of developers exploded while the barriers to entry supposedly went up, my answer is that the new opportunities that came with unrestricted worldwide distribution of software trumped the narrower issue of writing that software in the first place.

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bipin_nag 1968 days ago
>Everyone who had MS Office installed back in the 1990s (which was basically everyone) could easily run some quick VB code to try things.

Can't be everyone, how do you know the numbers? How many Office users actually used VB? MS famously stifled competition in internet browsers. 1990s numbers still won't give a fair picture.

>The Web fixed all that, albeit at the cost of cratering developer productivity, a massive increase in complexity and higher barriers to entry for new devs.

Why blame the web for higher barrier to entry. JS is doing fine. See a few surveys for popular languages:  https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#most-popular-...

https://madnight.github.io/githut/

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