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Comment by shaan7 | Hacker News Reader

> But phones? I just can't be bothered to care about them. Can I make calls and check some maps? It's great!

I understand where you are coming from, and it makes 100% sense if you own a PC/laptop as well. But guess what? In a lot of places the majority of population (including younger people) do NOT have them. Their first and only experience of computers is a mobile phone. Even though "teenagers who care about computers" is a low number, now a lot of them won't realize that something like a general purpose computer exists (until way later, if they end up using a computer at work).

I grew up being fascinated with how useful and flexible computers are and fell in love with creating software. I'm quite sure that I would not have happened if I was born during the last 10 years.

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I do get your point, but I don't agree it supports the thesis that there's a "regression" happening.

Broadly, I could see two situations in which people only get a phone and have no computer: either "poor" countries, where they can't afford a computer and will get a phone that's better than nothing, and very affluent ones where they'll just get a phone or tablet and not care. Although I'm not sure that this second category has no computer.

While I do sympathize with this, and I think that it would more likely than not allow people to discover this curiosity by, as you say, being fascinated with how flexible phones would be, my point is somewhat different: this isn't "going back". Phones never were open. And I'm pretty sure that the people who can't afford a computer now couldn't afford one in the 90s.

As such, for me, this is more of a lost opportunity to progress rather than a regression.

[for simplicity, I'm using the term "computer" as a desktop/laptop computer]

> Phones never were open

They certainly were more open than today. It was much easier to fiddle around with the software with smartphones that Nokia used to have, for example. Both iOS and Android were easier in that respect, too. So there's clearly been a regression there. However, if you meant "phones were never as open as PCs", ah yes then I agree.

> As such, for me, this is more of a lost opportunity to progress rather than a regression.

I would agree with the spirit of that, but the problem is that a lot of computers are actually being "dumbed down" so that they are more similar to phones simply because a larger population is used to them. For example most young people might not find it weird if some day MS or Apple make it painfully difficult to install PC/Mac apps from outside their stores.

You're right we are not there yet (yay?), but we seem to be moving towards that.

>It was much easier to fiddle around with the software with smartphones that Nokia used to have

Uh, as a young person during that time, I think there may have been one kid in my high school who was the right combination of nerdy and well-off to get a smartphone. It was still cool if your flip-phone came with any internet-connected features at all.

Is it really any more limiting? They can make programs in Scratch or other web apps on their phone. It's not "real" native software but it wasn't in the 1980's either. Kids then used BASIC interpreters. Compilers for "real" programming languages like C were unaffordable. Even assembly language and machine language were often inaccessible because computers didn't have an assembler or hex editor and you couldn't get new software like that without spending money.

You can’t use Scratch on your iPhone, and the built-in basic programming was far more “native” than any similar smartphone equivalent we have today. My TI-89 calculator remains way more programmable than my smartphone.

I’m not sure why it has become so common on HackerNews to defend this trend and/or pretend it’s not a trend.

Isn’t that the wrong comparison though? If you want to run scratch just use something other than an iPhone.

When I was a kid we had 8bit micros. They were programmable but they were also eye wateringly expensive. So it was a struggle to own anything you could program at all.

Also they all came with closed source, proprietary OSs.

I used to spend a fair amount of time just starring at adverts for things I couldn’t afford and that would be obsolete before I could.

Now you can get a whole computer given away free on the front cover of a magazine and it will do a pretty good job of running scratch for you.

Then just install Pythonista.

ML wasn't totally inaccessible by that metric, it was quite common to store ML in DATA statements and POKE it into the desired memory locations. Depending on the platform it would either be directly called with SYS or CALL type statements, or it'd be vectored through USR() (or perhaps the ampersand in Applesoft).

That's true. I was mainly thinking of a struggle I had trying to create a binary .com file containing ML. The BASIC had no function for writing an arbitrary binary file. In hindsight, I suppose you could use one of those ML techniques you mentioned to do file I/O but that would have seemed out of reach in difficulty to me as a teenager.

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