* Authoritarian governments don't give their subjects a good civic education because an educated population tends to start demanding more freedoms.
* Industrial barons never wanted their factory workers to learn about unions because once they did, sure enough they wanted to unionize.
* To desire and defend your digital rights you need to understand how the digital world works, and what's at stake. Big tech doesn't want you thinking about uncomfortable things like that. They want you to pay your monthly fees, watch the ads they put in front of you, go to bed and do it all again tomorrow.
Virtually everyone with power, since the beginning of civilization, has preferred for their subjects to be poorly informed about anything that threatens their power.
This seems to have been untrue in the USSR, and it seems currently untrue in China, the first two big authoritarian governments that came to my mind. Also "because" is doing the heavy lifting in your sentence, I do wonder how you arrived at that causality.
Your apologies for some of the greatest criminals in history not withstanding, my original comment referred to the concept of a good civic education. There was some debate in the responses about what that constitutes. I think it includes a comparative analysis of various systems of government and how people under those systems fare. What we can say about the systems in the USSR and China is that as a matter of undisputed fact, people living under those systems are poorer and more likely to be subject to arbitrary detention or execution than the typical citizens of the world's democratic countries. A good civic education will teach that because it is a fact. A bad civic education will use propaganda to conceal facts like those.
Can you imagine school children in China, one of them asks in a political science class "What's wrong with US democracy?" and nobody can give them an answer without first mentioning the genocide of native americans, the mass graves in latin american, the contras, Iraq.
The Chinese killed some 75,000,000 people (mostly their own) in the 20th century.
Plus, why did you make this about the US? Have you forgotten that other democracies exist? I was talking about the human rights track records of democracies in general versus authoritarian governments in general. Democracies consistently have better records. You're the one who decided to cherry pick one of the worse democracies (and still failed to demonstrate that it is as bad as one of the worst authoritarian states).
We were talking about democracy and citizen's education regarding how their own country's political systems.
You're the one who is so obsessed and foaming at the mouth with any chance to bash China/USSR, you couldn't hesitate to derail a non-ideological conversation into boring ideological drivel.
Twitter, Instagram and TikTok would like to differ. User created content is still a major thing, even if we stopped calling it web 2.0. Most of that just happens in other domains than programming (though Roblox exists, so programming does happen too).
Similarly, Youtube or TikTok wants you to create the most funny, informative and creative videos possible. Not because they love creativity, but because it serves their interest.
But no, most creators are not doing anything creative. One way to see this is to notice there are movies made a 100 years ago that people will still watch today. There are books written half a millennium ago people read today. There are pieces of music written 100s of years ago people listen to today.
There’s almost nothing created on Instagram or TikTok that people will want to watch even a few days after it is created.
To be fair Twitter might have some posts of value but that’s because of the idea that almost certainly came independently of Twitter. Twitter is just the avenue by which it’s spread.
I think YouTube still does encourage the generation of quality new content to some extent that people may want to watch years and maybe even decades down the line. But that’s pretty much the only “creator” app that does that. And that’s probably a result of the fact that YT was created well before social media and mobile phones came around, so the content standard set on YouTube was fairly high quality. Newer “creator” apps encourage short throwaway content that can go viral. Not quality, creative content that can stand the rest of time.
Now that putting creative works out into the world is cheap and easy, yes, the vast majority of the dross will be forgotten almost immediately after it’s uploaded, but a few gems will remain the be passed around for decades or longer.
p.s. even more than 200 years old: https://youtu.be/qP-7GNoDJ5c
Smartphones don't encourage programming because programming is power, in so far as it facilitates the ability of the individual to bring about actions manifesting their plans and desires. Apple, Google, et al. want obedient, docile serfs who pay tribute unto Caesar, tempt more serfs into their domain, and maintain their aesthetic preferences and dominion.
The productive question is: What can be done about it? How can the user be liberated from subservience and helplessness, which they are taught to desire with such fervor by well-funded and highly sophisticated propaganda/PR machines?
Would rephrase as the desire to keep you dependent is a result of the control and cashflow they desire. But yeah, we called TV the idiot box for similar reasons.
For this to be true, logically the tools to create smartphone programs would be fiercely protected and only available to the chosen few and smartphone OS developers would never in a million years promote learning how to program on their devices.
From my end it looks like the opposite of all of that is happening.
I went to a school in "THE GOLDEN AGE" of 8-bit micros and I was the only one out of 1,100 who used the single room of Apple IIs to type in BASIC programs.
My daughters went to a school that has classes on programming, including Android development.
Turbo Pascal used to be so expensive I couldn't afford it.
Android studio is $0.00 and the (free) resources for development that apple and google openly distribute make many of my college classes look pathetic.
In a way, they are. They are gatekept in a way that is transparent to you because you find yourself on the correct side of the gate. Apple's gatekeeping is overt, while Google's is more covert:
1) They require a desktop computer - a powerful one at that. Apple requires a Mac. It would be trivial to release an app builder that ran on the phone, but they don't. Apple even outright forbids such apps, or any kind of interpreted environment. Apple also forbids installing things on stock iPhones without passing through Apple servers, and they require you to pay $99 and be over 18 for that privilege. This completely kneecaps the development of any kind of "demoscene".
2) They are ridiculously baroque. I mean awful. Look at this[0] Hello World - "the simplest Android app". Note the wall of perplexing XML, and complex directory tree. Note the phrase "You don't need to understand this code fully." This is not irreducible complexity, this is the result of an attitude that the only people who should be developing apps are professionals with a lot of experience and patience.
There is 0 room for casual exploration in the app ecosystem. Hell, I enjoy programming, I can knock up a fun demo in LOVE in under a minute, I carry a smartphone everywhere, and yet I've never written a smartphone app. Not once. It's too much of a pain. You wrote BASIC programs for fun in school? So did I, on my calculator, at a rate of maybe 1 a day. Show me the kid who writes smartphone apps like that.
[0] https://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/the-simplest-android-app...
But yeah, native GUI dev is a mess. I wrote webapps all the time when I was in school though. Programming on a phone is kinda a pain because of the small keyboard and lack of browser devtools but it's definitely doable.
Trying to answer to question but excluding resources on the Internet is like trying to program without the Internet. It's very much possible, but only for some bizarre purity test. Between Stack Overflow, Google, and even ChatGPT, never mind that documentation is all online these days (developer.apple.com; devdocs.io); it's hard to imagine programming without the Internet. Why then not include Cloud IDEs as part of the answer? What sort of purity test do they fail? Sure, they rely on resources not on the device, but to the broader question - "encourage you to learn programming", I'd say they very much qualify.
> setContent { Text("Hello world!") }
I was able to type that out on my phone with only a little bit of trouble.
Reworking jsfiddle's UX to be optimized for smartphones (aka remove the huge left div) is an easy win. I'd be surprised if there wasn't already something like that in the edtech space, where teaching kids to code is currently very popular.