[kristopolous]

In 1951 you could have whined, "With the rise of pro-grammable computers, the Engineer can simply turn his brain off and let the computer do all the work. The era of craftsmanship has come to a close. No, no need to think dear friend, we have ourselves a Computer. Aughh!"

Then, in 1961 you could have sighed, "The knowledge of how to maintain a computer will be gone forever with this increase in reliability. How will someone ever know truly how computers work unless they have to fix them piece by piece."

Then, in 1971 you could have pined, "With the rise of these time-share based operating environments, the future programmer has all the hard things taken care of for them. All that you need now is a data-bank administrator and record input clerk. There is no future in computing!"

Then, in 1981 you could have lamented, "Baugh! The rise of these pre-built micros means that the future generations won't know how to work a logic analyzer or an oscilloscope. They will never use a soldering gun or know the joy of assembling a memory board because they will just drop it in the slot. Ug!"

Then, in 1991 you could have scoffed, "well with all these new fancy compilers, nobody will appreciate the joys of directly manipulating registers and stacks. Instead, they will spend their career in higher order abstractions without ever truly knowing the soul of the machine."

Then, in 2001 you could have cried, "This era of the world wide web is hastening the decline of single system software and entertainment consumption is simply supplanting productivity for the largest use case of computing. Programming has become nothing more then playing Oz in the Emerald City; pulling pre-built levers as the scarecrows and tin-men of the world marvel on the sidelines"

[vacri]

And if you did, you'd be missing the point. The explosion of computing in the general public over the past 20 years has seen the explosion of innovation - "the internet", as an industry, is really only 15 years old. Not even that. And yet it's innovated and transformed forever our modern societies.

That innovation has been driven by the masses being able to create things on their computers. Something that potentially restricts the ability to innovate across the masses shouldn't just be handwaved away like yet another whine.

[GHFigs]

That innovation has been driven by the masses being able to create things on their computers.

Has it?

[vacri]

Where did everything that's on the internet exist before ~1995?

How did you access it?

[GHFigs]

I don't understand what you're driving at.

Software represents only a fraction of "everything that's on the Internet", creators of software only a fraction of creators in general, and creators in general being only a fraction of "the masses".

[vacri]

That there has been so much software written, and content created with that software, and support structures to supply that content to you (like networking or ecommerce) indicates that folks have to be able to innovate - the greater the mass of people that can tinker, the greater the mass of creators you get.

There was a much higher ratio of creators to users in the computer world in the 60s. But there wasn't the sheer volume of innovation there has been since the masses got involved - even though there's a lower ratio of creators, the absolute number of creators is far higher - hell, we're even on a site that is designed to do nothing but cater for this influx of creators, and it's getting one application a minute.

The fewer people that have exposure to tinkering, the lower the number of innovators overall.

[GHFigs]

Writing software is not the only kind of creation.

[ugh]

How does it restrict?