Will walled gardens kill programming?

Over the course of the past few years, we have seen an increase in the number of devices touted as being replacements for the average users desktop (tablets, smart phones, ...)? It is certainly true that these devices are going to have a charm for those who feel that modern computers are too complicated (well they are, but thats a different matter) and who would prefer something "simpler" and with a older brother type figure looking out for them by having an application approval process.

If we continue to go down this path, are we cheating future computer geeks? Should it not, in some sense, be a fundamental right to be able to use your device as you please? Would we have been drawn to programming if it was necessary for us to go through some third party intermediary, because we are not to be trusted with our own machines?

What are your thoughts, o mighty /prague/

>>6

We are living in an age of convenience for the computer programmer.  20 years ago, it was a pain in the ass to get together a C compiler (or assembler) and computer to dink together your god-awful program.  10 years ago it was still a pain, but we had GCC 2.95 (which sucked pretty hard if you liked C++) and if you weren't on Linux (which very, very few were) you could BUY an IDE to program your precious computer.  SVN wasn't released until later that year so you were stuck with CVS which was about as bad as copying files around every time you made a change to something (or you could do what I did which was use a the beta... and deal with corrupted repositories).  Python was still pre-2.0, which if you're a Python programmer, you think of as major suckage.  As for Haskellers, at least we had Hugs.

Right now, programming tablets and smartphones and whatnot is about where programming desktops was 10 years ago.  You're just soft because you're used to the convenience of desktop & server programming of the 2000s.