I am reading "Simplexity," the 2008 book by J. Kluger. He writes: "Electronic devices ... have gone mad. It is not just your TV or your camera or your twenty-seven-button cell phone with its twenty-one different screen menus and its 124-page instruction manual. ... The act of buying nearly any electronic product has gone from the straightforward plug-and-play experience it used to be to a laborious, joy-killing experience in unpacking, reading, puzzling out, configuring, testing, cursing, reconfiguring, stopping altogether to call the customer support line, then calling again an hour or two later, until you finally get whatever it is you've bought operating in some tentative configuration that more or less does all the things you want it to do--at least until some error message causes the whole precarious assembly to crash and you have to start it all over again. ... " After elaborating on this topic (for several pages), the author concludes that "there's necessarily complex and then there's absurdly complex." What he does not analyze, at least in the chapter I am reading, is the effect all this may have on the minds of our push-button youngsters. Push-button experience is very different from building radios, repairing grandfather clocks, tractors, cars, etc. Will the overall effect be positive or negative? What do you think?
I think that writing/repairing code is more challenging than repairing a tractor. Tractors are very simple tools. I think you cannot repair a car now days without some button pushing. They are tactile... as opposed to code... but I thought this was an interesting question... what happens when you give a bunch of illiterate Ethiopian children a bunch of Motorola Zoom tablets? http://www.dvice.com/archives/2012/10/ethiopian-kids.php They hack them. Having never seen a printed word some of them, much less the instructions. Code is remarkably complicated simple logical operations strung together. It is no different than a flywheel in a tractor in an abstract sense. You diagnose the problem, say the starter cranks, but makes noise, and doesn't turn the engine enough to turn over. You debug... you inspect the flywheel and starter gears one tine at a time looking for defects. Finding missing teeth, you repair or replace the flywheel. I don't know if you have seen kids today working their phones... but they are wizards. I have been typing since I was a kid. I am damned good at it. But you set me next to a kid on a phone texting, and they will crush me on a small kb. Your car has idiot lights... and your phone has more intricate inner workings than a grandfather clock... in a much more compact space. Technology is marvelous. Repair has just moved from large heavy parts to these... and if you can fix... or better yet re-purpose these... you are in a good spot.
So that's how you debug code...inspect the flywheel & starter gears...I knew I was doing something wrong.
He was correct in 2008, however, I'm noticing that most (not all) consumer electronics are getting easier to configure right out of the box. For example, my new TV and new Blu-Ray player's remotes are compatible, despite being different brands. Not only are they compatible, but no reprogramming the remote was needed. In addition, the extra inputs on the TV made things a lot easier to hook the blu-ray up, than it did in the past to hook a DVD player or VCR up to a TV. Another example is computer printers. They are much easier to configure in this day and age than they were in the 1980s.
Funny... I remember when the only "tv setup" was between the analog horizontal and vertical... and maybe some antenna pushing. I disregard this theory...
I swear to God, kids are born knowing how to operate all electronic devices that will be invented for the next ~15 years. I wonder what would happen if you gave them DOS machines.
Most are absolutely lost. A few months ago in school, I was the only one that had no major issue with UNIX CLI, because I used DOS for years. But most of the others were completely lost.
