The launch of the iPad spurred gigabytes of reviews and opinions from lots of people, most of whom have not seen the device yet. I’m not going to talk about it, instead I’ll offer a counterpoint to two very insightful posts from Alex Payne and Mark Pilgrim.
The gist of their concern is that if they had grown up with an iPad instead of a real computer, they would not have become programmers. They argue that the iPad is a device aimed at the majority who want things to just work and have no desire to look under the hood. It’s not meant to be programmable or “tinkered with” by the end user. Mark reminisces, talking about his first computer:
I was 10. That was 27 years ago, but I still remember what it felt like when I realized that you — that I — could get this computer to do anything by typing the right words in the right order and telling it to RUN and it would motherfucking run.
His story is similar to mine. I also got my first computer 27 years ago. It was a Texas TI99/4A, and I felt the same awe. I spent an entire summer obsessed with it, doing nothing but programming little games and generally trying to understand how it worked. I had always been fascinated by technology, but after I encountered computers I knew I had found my calling.
Now, let’s play devil’s advocate and imagine the TI99 had not been programmable. Flashback to three years before, when I begged my parents to get me the Atari 2600, the extremely entertaining but closed gaming console. To quote Bryan Adams, I played it until my fingers bled. I was really curious about how it worked, but I could do nothing about it. Still, someone had designed it and programmed it. Someone programmed the first computer. Someone built the first computer from scratch. Charles Babbage came up with the concept of a programmable computer decades before electricity was available in people’s homes.
To me, this lament sounds a bit like the music industry saying that there will be less motivation for people to become musicians if they cannot make money by selling infinite copies of recordings of their instrumental prowess (or mastery of the auto-tune). This raises the question, is this a problem and if so why?
Clearly tinkering is as old as humanity, otherwise we would be stuck in the stone age. As I grew up in Argentina in the 70s we had our own Lego-like system of building blocks called Rasti. They were pretty simple, but you could build pretty much anything you could envision provided that your parents could get you enough block sets. Today there are much more advanced tinkering systems such as Lego Mindstorms. Perhaps if it had been available as I was growing up I would be a robotics engineer today.
Like I said, the above articles have a number of good points, especially the ridiculous prosecution of DVD Jon for minding his own business at home. But this is not the sunset of tinkering that Mark fears. There are more tools for tinkering than ever before in the history of humanity. True, they may not be commonly available to random kids in middle-class homes as programmable computers have been over the past few decades. Does that mean that there will be fewer programmers? No. I know numerous examples of excellent programmers that did not see a computer until college. Some of them simply had grown up too early. Others came from families who could not afford computers until later.
To conclude: as long as there is a need for software that can only be created by humans, there will be enough programmers. This is guaranteed by two things: the fact that we live in a market economy and, more importantly, the fact that the desire for tinkering is something that comes from our ancestors. Right now all around the world there are kids creating, building, programming and imagining. A lot of them do not have access to computers.