[jmduke]

This is why I love programming -- and the programming community, warts and all. Tiffany's an Environmental Science major who had a month of free time so she decided to learn how to make web pages. That's the same way I started (albeit as an English major), and the cocktail of instant feedback and ease of discovery kept me as a happy addict of the command line ever since.

To me, accessibility and approachability are two of the most important tenets of any discipline. I think it's important that we make sure there are more Tiffanies and less stories of overharsh criticism (eg. http://harthur.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/771/)

You might not think that everyone should learn how to program, and that's okay, I agree with you -- but at the very least, I think people should have the ability to learn what they want to learn, as ably and quickly as possible.

[mb_72]

Well .... making a website != programming.

Maybe it's because I'm old (41, starting programming on a TRS-80 in the early 80s), but I'm astonished sometimes at how much fuss is made over such relatively minor achievements. This is lowering the bar on what stories are 'interesting', and - honestly - turns me off coming to HN because of the (for me) lower signal : noise ratio.

And I disagree that accessibility is so important. Hard stuff is hard, and takes time and effort to work out. To provide a counter and parallel example - these days anyone can download some software and produce 'music' on their computer, and the ease of doing this means that a whole pile of rubbish is produced, some of which people actually believe is worthy of sale. People who are talented and capable will always find a way; conversely, I don't think it's a bad thing that people who are less talented and less capable give up, and find something else they are better at and have more fun doing.

[lsc]

>Well .... making a website != programming.

Oh man, I remember when everyone looked down on web programmers and PHP monkeys. Hah. (I also did my much of my early programming on a trs-80, but mine was an obsolete tandy model 100 that I brought to school in the mid-90s, mostly to automate the 'guess and check' rote math homework.)

It used to be that there was a strong hierarchy. I know in the '90s and the first half of the '00s, you had the "real programmers" - the embedded and systems programmers... then the sysadmins, then your web programmers, then your web "designers" - with respect scaling in the obvious direction.

But, I think, this has shifted, especially in the HN world, where VC is very influential. The web programmers are now the 'serious programmers' - the valuable commodities, with designers also being fairly important. My people, the sysadmins are largely considered surplus population, and what you would have called 'real programmers' are now irrelevant old fogies that sometimes have interesting things to say.

(the question that looms in my mind is this: Will the construction of online CRUD apps be automated the same way that the construction of native CRUD apps were automated in the '90s? Will we have 'visual FoxPro' for the web? I mean, my stepfather, a long time user of such programs has shown me some of the rudimentary dot-net stuff... but it's not all the way there, as far as I can see, when it comes to whipping up a webapp as simply and easily as it whips up a native app.)

>This is lowering the bar on what stories are 'interesting', and - honestly - turns me off coming to HN because of the (for me) lower signal : noise ratio.

See, I've always thought of HN as a site more focused on the business side than the technical side. I mean, we do have some interesting technical articles, but ycombinator is about making money, and a lot of that is raising money. (my impression is that being young and goodlooking is an important part of raising money right now, but what do I know? I have yet to seriously attempt raising money.)

From the business perspective? learning how to, you know, use computers is pretty important and interesting.

>conversely, I don't think it's a bad thing that people who are less talented and less capable give up, and find something else they are better at and have more fun doing.

See, I kindof disagree. Sortof. in a way. You see, I think using computers is a bit like literacy. We all can't be Shakespeare, but even if you only get to 'spot is on the rug' well, you are way better off than otherwise.

Personally, I think that really basic programming should be taught in schools the way reading and writing is. Sure, most people aren't very good, but we put a hell of a lot of effort into getting folks to the 'spot is on the rug' level, and I think that most people would be better off if they, say, knew how to make a loop and an 'if' statement in basic.

I mean, certainly, most people can't be specialist programmers. But look at those CRUD app creators in the '90s, like FoxPro. Your ability to understand business processes was just as important, if not more important than your programming ability. We have the ability to make simple programming languages. We have the compute power to be able to run extremely inefficient code at reasonable speeds. Knowing just a little can help a whole lot.

[potatolicious]

> "Will we have 'visual FoxPro' for the web?"

IMO we've already seen the automation of web-CRUD. It used to be a lot of work to set up even a simple CRUD app on the web, now a brain-dead simple CRUD app is 15 minutes in skilled hands.

This differs from Visual FoxPro substantially. Our jobs are being automated, but instead of automating into the hands of an army of lay users, it's automating into the hands of a few skilled practitioners.

The productivity of the modern web programmer is at least an order of magnitude beyond where we were 10 years ago. What used to take a veritable army of CS majors takes 3 people and a fridge full of Red Bull.

Our tools and processes are getting better every day. So far "stuff that needs to be done" seems to be outpacing "increasing efficiency per programmer", but I doubt that will hold true forever.

[lsc]

>IMO we've already seen the automation of web-CRUD. It used to be a lot of work to set up even a simple CRUD app on the web, now a brain-dead simple CRUD app is 15 minutes in skilled hands.

hm. so what tools would a skilled developer use to, say, write a simple invoicing system in 15 minutes?

[klibertp]

Most would most likely use only one essential tool: google. Finding, for example, this: https://www.djangopackages.com/grids/g/ecommerce/

[kunil]

"Oh man, I remember when everyone looked down on web programmers and PHP monkeys. "

I believe this is still the case

"web programmers"

hah!

[hershel]

I think microsoft lightswitch is the "visual foxpro" for the web of today.

[lsc]

Hm. Interesting. I have not seen this 'lightswitch' before.

[iamwil]

Of course it's interesting, but especially if you think of the context and a broader scope when you look beyond the immediate story. I'll start with the smallest scope and zoom out.

On its face, it's a person talking about their personal accomplishment in making a static HTML/CSS website--something that you seems minor to you as a professional that has been doing it for as as long as you have--but I think you forgot the original thrill you got when you first got your TRS-80 to work. Being able to see the thrill of a beginner again should remind you of your own personal thrills. To have more people be able to code, and to speak the same basic language is a good thing. How many times have you wished your manager knew just a bit of coding, so he's not whipping you on why you took 2 weeks to debug that concurrent code and ended up only changing one line?

At a broader level, many of us are programmers, but we're not programmers in a vacuum. Few of us make things only just for ourselves, and being able to be a better programmer often is being able to relate and empathize with users. In addition, seeing programming again from the eyes of a beginner will often teach you much about what is difficult and what is not, because you've been dulled to the pain for so long. Beginners remind us to rethink assumptions we have, and whether they're still valid.

And lastly, at the biggest scope, software is eating the world. Many of the middle class work and jobs are being replaced with automation, and the OP is a small drop in the river of people realizing this, and scrambling to learn. If you're an entrepreneur, this is especially interesting because there's a demand and a need for education for a different audience, and that is opportunity.

In reference to accessibility, I think it is important. I agree that hard stuff is hard. There are no shortcuts to mastering something. But it doesn't mean that getting started has to be hard. Many of the cultural influences on society nowadays has been made simply due to accessibility to technology. When you democratize a technology for the masses, sure you're going to get lots and lots of crap. But there's no limited warehouse on the internet, and we have the ability to float cream to the top with search, aggregators and other tools. Without this phenomenon, many of the blogs you read on a daily basis wouldn't be on HN for you. Many of the youtube videos that you learned something from or were entertained by wouldn't be there. Because, if accessibility isn't important, then "hey, just setup an Apache web server and FTP it there."

If accessibility isn't important, you might as well drive a car by timing the firing of the pistons, rather than stepping on the gas pedal.

[mb_72]

As a beginner to programming I had enough self-awareness to realise that my achievements were of little to no interest to those with more ability and experience, and certainly would not have been worth publishing in a magazine (as the equivalent would have been at the time). This is 'Hacker news' - but these days the word 'Hacker' has been diluted in meaning to something that doesn't really mean 'hacking' any more.

The car metaphor is not a valid comparison - we are not talking about the operation of a tool, but gaining of skills in an area that requires both natural and learned abilities.

[iamwil]

I think you identify as a programmer and hacker, and things that encroach on that identity--such as beginners doing html/css calling it programming--causes you discomfort. And that blinds you to the interesting things about this.

Of course it is. Driving is a skill. You only consider driving the operation of a tool rather than a skill because its accessibility is so good.

[mb_72]

It causes me discomfort, yes, because if a beginner over-estimates what they are doing then they are in for more disappointment when they discover what they are really doing.

[dandelany]

I took a nontechnical friend of mine to Maker Faire in NYC a couple years ago and for the first 20 minutes or so all she could ask was "why?" As in, I know it's possible to make a robot that paints weird pictures or a flowerpot that sings or a giant, iron propane-flame-breathing dinosaur, but why would you? What purpose does it serve? Who's paying for this stuff anyway?

The answer, I think, lies at the center of the hacker mindset: there is inherent value in the experience of making things, and inextricably, the experience of learning how to make them, regardless of the value of the end product. Surely if we believe it's valuable in and of itself to eg. write a Brainfuck compiler or scrape HN for sentiment analysis or build and launch a satellite with the sole purpose of detecting gravitational waves, we must believe it's also valuable for someone to learn to program and build a project, even badly.

So with that in mind, I absolutely think accessibility is important, resume bullet points and job prospects aside; for the same reason I think art, music and woodshop should be taught in schools even though most kids won't grow up to be painters, singers or woodworkers.

[KirinDave]

> I took a nontechnical friend of mine to Maker Faire in NYC a couple years ago and for the first 20 minutes or so all she could ask was "why?" As in, I know it's possible to make a robot that paints weird pictures or a flowerpot that sings or a giant, iron propane-flame-breathing dinosaur, but why would you? What purpose does it serve? Who's paying for this stuff anyway?

I get really sad when I hear this question, because it is like this fundamental question people have and it lies at the heart of why some people appreciate art and some simply cannot.

But yeah. I got this from a relative and asked, "Why do you go out drinking and dancing?"

[bliti]

The great wall of China started as one measly block. Do we undermine the effort of the labourers that pushed it into place? It is just one rock. Not worthy of any praise.

But we may be missing the bigger picture. What you call a minor achievement is in reality a big step towards becoming a programmer. The biggest block to programming is being courageous enough to dig into the source code. Be it markup, or else. Who are we to criticize the achievements of others? When in reality we walked down the same path. Do you not remember the first time you were able to print your name to the terminal prompt? I do. It was 1984. I got the same jolly feeling when I did it with Javascript, back in the year 2000.

Who knows if the OP will turn out to be a great programmer?

[lobotryas]

The point is not criticizing the achievements of others, but putting them in context of a greater whole. Creating your own website is great, but it's a tiny first step in a long journey. If's up to the individual to see how far they want to stick with it, but we should never mislead people by telling them that their achievements are greater than they really are.

[beering]

I may be biased, but the amount of "putting them in their place" comments is disproportional to how much they overestimate themselves. I doubt Tiffany thinks that she's going to be debugging C++ for Google's [redacted] within the year, for example.

Others' accomplishments might seem tiny compared to where you are, but gradually realizing that there's always more to learn is part of the growing process. All of this "putting things into perspective" is perhaps unnecessary - when I got started, I certainly didn't (and couldn't) have had as wide of a perspective as I do now.

[lobotryas]

You're projecting onto my comment.

I wrote: "putting [the achievements of others] in context of a greater whole". This has nowhere near the negative connotations that you're implying.

>All of this "putting things into perspective" is perhaps unnecessary

Perspective is always important as it allows us to celebrate how far we've come and remain humble at how much remains.

Personally, I've seen too many CS101 students get an over-inflated ego after they are told that they've become "hacking Gods" after setting up their own blog and playing with customizing the CSS.

[ShirtlessRod]

Was anyone doing that here? Seemed like it was more of "good for you, here's some things to improve".

[KirinDave]

> making a website != programming.

I hear this a lot. While I would not call most basic work on websites very complex, I struggle to figure out why it's not programming.

You are writing a series of inline presentation commands mixed with content, not unlike how Knuth preferred to write (a technique he called literate programming and that frequently went double-meta when he'd embed TeX documentation for the Tex source code using TeX). This document structure can then be further augmented by directives in one of a few (common, many exist in the margins) ancillary languages, two of which have variables and loops, one of which is Turing complete.

Making websites is programming by any reasonable definition of the word. Usually the people I find saying it isn't then make arguments that are basically design to exclude anyone who hasn't been at it as long as they have. Usually, because they're a little insecure about the slow erosion of the barrier to entry to the field.

There are plenty of things in our modern world to get your jimmies rustled over, man. If you wanna take on a really scary-bad-idea issue in this sector look at how a very good embeddable Javascript engine is being misused for sub-par, poorly designed distributed systems programming.

[theseoafs]

This is a nice, comfy thought but it's just not true. Programming and web development are entirely different things, and it doesn't have anything to do with barriers to entry or how apparently "difficult" each of these things are. They're just different.

Any suitably competent and experienced programmer could pick up a new programming language in a week or two of focused study, but they'll basically be starting from scratch if they're learning HTML + CSS for the first time. Meanwhile, a web developer who only knows HTML and CSS is entirely unprepared to do any serious work in any real programming language, and would be starting from scratch if he decided to pick up C. This doesn't mean one is smarter or stupider than the other, but it does mean that the process of telling a computer what to do and the process of telling a computer "here's some text, and here's some guidelines about how you should display it" don't inform each other.

> one of which is Turing complete

Turing-completeness is not difficult for a piece of software to achieve (HTML5+CSS3 is basically Turing-complete by accident) and I'm sure you'd admit that HTML5+CSS3 is not an appropriate language for performing any serious computation.

[KirinDave]

> This is a nice, comfy thought but it's just not true.

Actually I think most people found it profoundly uncomfortable.

> Any suitably competent and experienced programmer could pick up a new programming language in a week or two of focused study, but they'll basically be starting from scratch if they're learning HTML + CSS for the first time.

This has nothing to do with your point. Most programmers struggle to pick up Lisp, Haskell and ML for the first time, but those are unambiguously programming. TeX is usually a bit tricky too.

> Meanwhile, a web developer who only knows HTML and CSS is entirely unprepared to do any serious work in any real programming language, and would be starting from scratch if he decided to pick up C.

Much as it pains me to do this, I cite Node.js as a counter example. People can and do write systems software using their understanding of Javascript as a basis. They may not do it well, but I know for a fact I could write certain types of servers acceptably well with it (I would prefer other tools, though).

Note that just because Ryah and co do not know how to write systems software, the basic principle is not invalidated. With some serious hacking to the node.js vm, it could be a viable competitor to Erlang.

This argument is incredibly weak, and basically self-refuting. But we have to repeat it every now and then.

> but it does mean that the process of telling a computer what to do and the process of telling a computer "here's some text, and here's some guidelines about how you should display it" don't inform each other.

You keep re-asserting this but haven't given any quantitive metrics for how it is different. You just keep saying it like I'm supposed to agree.

[theseoafs]

> Much as it pains me to do this, I cite Node.js as a counter example. People can and do write systems software using their understanding of Javascript as a basis. They may not do it well, but I know for a fact I could write certain types of servers acceptably well with it (I would prefer other tools, though).

Well, Javascript is a proper programming language. If you've got a web developer who knows Javascript, you've already got a web developer who knows programming. For the record I'm not making a distinction between systems software and higher-level programming here.

> You keep re-asserting this but haven't given any quantitive metrics for how it is different. You just keep saying it like I'm supposed to agree.

I think I've made my case pretty clearly (though this discussion is qualitative rather than quantitative). If you only know HTML and CSS, you aren't a "programmer" because you don't have the tools and knowledge it takes to write programs that do any nontrivial computation. If you only know Python, you don't have the tools and knowledge it takes to make an attractive static website. Of course, you can learn both, and having experience with computers makes learning one somewhat easier after you've learned the other.

[KirinDave]

> If you only know HTML and CSS, you aren't a "programmer" because you don't have the tools and knowledge it takes to write programs that do any nontrivial computation.

This is not a requirement for being a "programmer." It never has been.

> If you only know Python, you don't have the tools and knowledge it takes to make an attractive static website.

Nor, um, do you necessarily have the tools to do anything...

[madhuprasanna]

> If you only know Python, you don't have the tools and knowledge it takes to make an attractive static website.

1. Pelican 2. Frozen Flask 3. Many more!!

[rwg]

Well .... making a website != programming.

A friend told a story about a recent job interview for a devops position. He'd already had phone interviews and a breakfast chat with some engineers from a company with offices in his city, and all that was left was meeting the bigwigs at their office.

As the interview started, one of the executives asked, "So what programming languages do you use most often?" My friend replied, "Well, it depends on the job. PHP, Perl, Python, shell, ..." "Oh," the executive interrupted, "so you're not a programmer, you're a scripter!"

I understand and appreciate the sentiment that marking up text isn't programming, but it reminds me of the sort of mindset that says you're not a real programmer unless you're banging machine code into memory using the front panel of a MITS Altair 8800.

[kunil]

It is like, "you are not man enough"

Although, I call the work itself "Python scripting" or "Shell scripting" so if only thing I was doing is those two then I would also call myself "Scripter".

[mb_72]

In this instance clearly there was no scripting involved; your point addresses a straw man, not the reality of the situation in the original article.

[bcoates]

I hope this doesn't sound like piling on, but I agree with your parallel to music and come to the opposite conclusion. Even a small amount of ability is better than none, and it's a good thing that the barriers to access and boundaries between professional and amateur are being blurred. Being untalented and unable to produce music anyone would pay for is a terrible reason to give up on making music.

[mb_72]

Putting aside the payment issue, as that's a confusing one even for 'professionals' in this modern music world - I find it difficult to believe people will get much joy from something they have no talent at. More to the point, there is the opportunity cost; time is better spent on something they have more ability for, and hence will derive more enjoyment from.

Taken to an extreme, lack of talent that is disclosed in public causes people a lot of stress. Take a look at any kind of 'world's next best singer' program for many examples of this.

[mironathetin]

"Maybe it's because I'm old (41, ..."

with 41 you are certainly NOT old! You just started to be very experienced. You comment and your annoyance about this "news" proves it. And I totally agree with you.

Her facebook friends are a sufficient audience to say a "well done".