[svenpeter]

> it is, after all, a popular hobby of children who have nothing but time on their hands and access to the Internet. You certainly don’t need to buy hardware or have access to special training to get started.

yup, that's how I learned all of this!

> And, to be clear, I do think the current situation of closed systems is not great,

Agreed!

> and I do think that we do have a lot of engineers who grew up on open systems that they could tinker on going on to design things like iPhone for their children to use.

These days there are also more open system like, say, the Raspberry Pi. Back in my day (oh god, I'm growing old!) we had to first exploit video game consoles to get something comparable :-)

We made a slightly related argument when we didn't really feel like driving the WiiU homebrew scene almost 8 years ago (stop making me feel old!) [1]

[1] https://fail0verflow.com/blog/2013/espresso/

[saagarjha]

I think the situation is complicated. For hobbyists it certainly seems like the situation has gotten much better: there's lots of well supported, cheap microcontrollers and little boards for people to play with. But I think for the average user, the situation has regressed. I've heard of many an engineer who got into programming because they played around with BASIC and system extensions on their home computer, because those systems were open and easy to get started on doing that sort of stuff. These days, a child's computing device might be an iPad, or a Chromebook; they're certainly fine for getting work done, but they don't feel like they "invite experimentation" in the same way as systems of the past might've.

[photojosh]

My pet theory is that this view fails to recognise that we have moved to a culture of abundance* from the previous culture of scarcity. The lack of 'invitation to experiment' is 100% because there is an overabundance of distraction and lack of constraints.

* for the privileged! The digital divide is very real.