View Source
Jason Gorman riffed on a blog post by David R. Heffelfinger in which David was lamenting the move away from the sort of setups that computers of the 80’s shipped with. Specifically, David misses BASIC and the way that “it was expected for end users to write their own applications.” According to David, ever since the 90’s, it has become increasingly difficult to simply buy a computer and start programming…
So I wonder, how do new generations of software developers get their start? It is not as easy to “get your feet wet” these days like it was back in the day. —David R. Heffelfinger
I can tell you from personal experience how the new generation of software developers get their start. It’s called “View Source”…
It was almost exactly 10 years ago this month that I was sitting in my 1 bedroom apartment in Seattle, a couple months from completing my master’s degree in family therapy. I worked construction in the mornings, I had an internship in the afternoons, and classes every night. My daughter Rose was a few months old (she slept in the closet) and we were planning to move to Chicago to be closer to Staci’s family. I was, not surprisingly, looking for ways to supplement my income and had fallen in love with the World Wide Web over the previous 3 years. A friend had tried to explain HTML to me and showed me that you could tell your browser to show you the code it was running. So I started periodically perusing “web page code”. It was reassuring that there was so much English in there, and this made it less intimidating when I decided to learn HTML in order to apply to become a guide at About.com to earn some extra money. I learned by typing HTML into Notepad and executing it with Internet Explorer. A few months later, I did the same thing with JavaScript.
So although David says that in the mid-90’s there weren’t many baked-in options for programming, by the late 90’s we were back in action. And we still are. Is there an operating system that ships today that doesn’t ship with a web browser that runs JavaScript and a text editor pre-installed? Is there a web browser that doesn’t allow you to “View Source”? And the best part about the whole thing? The software that’s running your code usually has Google built into it! Any question you could ever think to ask about HTML or JavaScript is milliseconds away. Seriously, I can’t imagine learning how to develop software without having a web browser at my beckon call. How did those BASIC guys do it?!? (I know I tried and failed with BASIC on my Apple IIe in ‘87.)
Now, I’m sure there are some purebloods out there who are rolling their eyes at me, concerned that I would hold up coding HTML and JavaScript in Notepad and Internet Explorer 5 as the replacement for BASIC and a command prompt.
But that’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s amazing how powerful these 2 languages are when combined with free, instantaneous, and limitless information about them and a world-wide delivery mechanism to let newbies show off their skills. Combine them with a free server-side language like PHP and a free database like MySQL, and people’s lives start changing. Now, again, the purebloods will likely curl their lips and lament the hordes of incompetent programmers who haven’t learned the correct theories, who inflict untold damage on the term “programmer”. But be careful who you push away when you start pushing away these newbies! I guarantee there are some future world-changers in that bunch. People like, say, my friend Obie who has a similarly bootstrapped career.
Sure, many of these developers will not ultimately succeed. And, of course, many of them will write horrendous code along the way, just like so many of us did as we learned from our mistakes. But I view these hordes as an opportunity rather than a problem. What these readily available tools mean to me is that our apprentices always come to us with existing skills. I never get a blank slate. Because if you’re interested in becoming a software developer and have access to a computer, there’s nothing stopping you from starting other than your own lack of motivation. And if you are applying to become a software apprentice at Obtiva, then you’re obviously motivated. Therefore, the ubiquity and relevance of tools (such as web browsers, HTML, and JavaScript) allows our apprentices to become productive members of our teams more quickly. And with these skills in place we can get down to the more interesting business of helping them learn the deeper lessons of our craft.
