Hacker News Reader

Commercialization and commoditization: "Why make things better when people don't care?"

Oh, people do care. Programmers are expensive, and making them more productive means more money for the bottom line.

It’s just that we don’t know how. Even designing a good text based language is very challenging, and in no way a solved problem. Something graphical and interactive has a much larger design surface, and is thus even harder to get right, especially for general purpose programming.

I don’t know that the people making the decisions care all that much. Even though programmers are expensive, most managers seem to prefer to hire a dozen programmers where far fewer would get the job done if given access to better tools. They look better leading a bigger team regardless of the teams output.

The incentive exists for the shareholders, but they are not the ones making hiring decisions and choosing tools for programmers to use.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com