[dwh452]

What's sad is how difficult it is to write software today. In the old days your dad could buy a C64 and cobble together an application. It should be vastly easier to do the same kind of thing with vastly better building blocks today. Why can't some Grandma drag and drop some widgets and have a recipe manager with sharing features amongst her friends and family?

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

Here's a few disorganized thoughts in good faith

1. Because half her friends and family are on iOS, and that means fighting the App Store. (This is a social problem essentially, in fighting Apple)

2. Because networking is hard. How would you have shared recipes with a computer in the C64 days? Email? BBS? (There are partial technical solutions to this, but they would require people to run something like friend-to-friend overlay networks)

3. Because most stuff happens in web browsers and that means pay-to-play, or vendor lock-in, or using AWS free tier and being a programmer. (Ass, grass, or cash, nobody hosts for free. Friend-to-friend networks may also help with this)

4. Because a recipe manager with sharing is best implemented as just emailing your recipes to your friends and storing them as txt files locally. Anything more complicated is beyond the scope of a Visual Basic-style drag-and-drop WYSIWYG anyway

5. When was drag-and-drop enough? The widgets need code behind them to save and open files, right?

6. You might be kinda onto something, and the longer I write async code I more I think the programming world is ready for another big pruning. Like when structured programming said "No goto, no long jumps, if-else and exceptions is all you need", we might be ready for "A single control thread which never blocks and never awaits, and delegates to worker tasks, is all you need until you are building some C100k shit"

[Viliam1234]

When I was a teenager, I imagined that after a decade or two of working with computers, I would be able to write a computer game over a weekend. Or maybe two weekends. I had a notebook full of ideas and sketches, so that when I am ready, I will make all those amazing games.

I even made a few (quite simple, from my today's perspective) games in Pascal during high school and university. I expected to become much more productive over years of practice.

That didn't happen, for several reasons.

First, my expectations for a good game have increased. I don't want to make the most complicated game possible; I am perfectly okay with 2D raster graphics and simple algorithms. But I expect a good game to have animations, sound effects, at least ten levels that feel different, and an option to save game progress. My old games barely had half of that (some were animated, some had ten or more levels, only one had both of that).

Second, things became more complicated. It is no longer "320 x 200 pixels, 256 colors". Windows are resizable; different screens have different sizes. Programs need to be aware that multiple threads exist. Sometimes there are many possible choices, and I get paralyzed by choosing between them. Programs are expect to have installers; it is no longer enough to have one EXE file, and optionally a few data files together in a ZIP file. It felt like every time I mastered something, a new problem appeared to be solved.

Third, as a teenager I didn't realize how much my everyday work would differ from the kind of work necessary to make a computer game. Some skills are transferable: I am more comfortable with using threads, parsing data files, writing algorithms, the program architecture in general. But many skills are not: if my dream is to make a desktop application, then e.g. all the web frameworks that I have learned over those years are useless for this purpose; and they have cost me a lot of time and effort. So from the perspective of making computer games, as an adult I maybe learn in five years as many relevant things as I have learned as a teenager in one year, when I had lots of free time that I could dedicate to this goal.

Fourth, life gets in the way. There is much less free time, and much more things that I need or want to do during that free time.

So here I am, after a few decades of IT jobs, and (a) I can't really make a complete computer game over a weekend, and (b) it's irrelevant, because until my kids grow up I probably won't get a free weekend anyway. Or rather, even the rare "free" weekend (when the kids are away) is spent on other things that have higher priority.

[fragmede]

How hard did you look? WordPress has a few recipe maker plugins if you didn't want to code anything. Just install one and password protect the whole thing, and then teach (and write instructions for) Grandma to use it.

In the age of powerful computers, you can use Hypercard on an emulated Mac, you can use any number of hypercard-clones out there. She can just use Google slides. etc.

[hathawsh]

I think the main difficulty is deployment. Grandma wants that recipe manager to be available to her family 24x7. How can she deploy it easily for free or very low cost? If there were a modern Hypercard, I think the key to its success would be making deployment extremely simple, reliable, and safe.

[fragmede]

NextJS with Neon on Vercel has a capable free tier, and there's enough training data that LLMs are decent at it. If Grandma is that interested in building an app, I'm sure she'd love to spend a few hours with a grandkid to set things up and then being taught how to vibe code (and also how to call said grand kid for help).

[Karrot_Kream]

There are platforms like Observable and Repl.It that just let you deploy code/data pretty quickly.

[bundie]

> Observable

> Repl.it

Sorry, Grandma has never heard of those fancy-pansy platforms.

[spaqin]

How about a very reliable device with an interface that even a child can understand, deployment process that consists of only one action, and no upkeep costs? Like, for example, a notebook... Not everything has to be computerized or software.

[jlarocco]

> Why can't some Grandma drag and drop some widgets and have a recipe manager with sharing features amongst her friends and family?

Because there's no money in it.