[evilduck]

Your work Chromebook is completely incomparable to a school issued Chromebook. It's doubtful that your employer locks you out of literally everything that would allow you to develop software on-device. See my other comments in this thread.

[bombcar]

People of HN-age are assuming that school Chromebooks are anything like the Apple-IIe or other computers they had "in the computer lab". Those machines had a "purpose" - but they were wide open for investigation by those who wanted to.

They're not. They're locked down as hard as they can be.

[aleph_minus_one]

> It's doubtful that your employer locks you out of literally everything that would allow you to develop software on-device.

In strongly regulated industries, it is not unusual that you are indeed strongly locked out of this, and you need to create special requests to get access to the specific functionalities (as an exception) that you need for developing software on-device.

[evilduck]

Right, many people have to treat their local computer as a thin-client and do everything through a WebEx session or similar means, which makes the local device irrelevant. Or if you're regulated but have to be specifically exempted and allowed to work in a way that schools would never permit, then in that case you'd not be arguing in good faith that kids are able to learn to code and develop on a Chromebook since they can't.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Or if you're regulated but have to be specifically exempted and allowed to work in a way that schools would never permit, then in that case you'd not be arguing in good faith that kids are able to learn to code and develop on a Chromebook since they can't.

No, I just wanted to show that your claim

> It's doubtful that your employer locks you out of literally everything that would allow you to develop software on-device. See my other comments in this thread.

simply does not hold in practice.

--

Addendum: Additionally, from my school experience, rather the attempts to circumvent "abitrary" restrictions on the computers which were set up by the school made you a good coder. :-)

[evilduck]

I sense that your claims and suggestions here strongly suggest that your school experience is not a recent one where you were issued a locked down Chromebook.

I would encourage you to expand your lived experience here. Circumventing "arbitrary" restrictions today will burn a hardware fuse, brick it for actual school allowed purposes and cost your parents $170 to resolve. The age of innocently hacking on school property is long gone.

[aleph_minus_one]

> I sense that your claims and suggestions here strongly suggest that your school experience is not a recent one

Of course.

But nevertheless, I have a feeling that the central difference is not in "recent or not", but in the fact that older generations were simply much more rebellious in not wanting to accept the restrictions set on the school computers and willingness to do everything imaginable to circumvent them.