I think we can return to the glory days of computing with one small tweak: insist that OS vendors include a lean and clean compiler in the default install.
An OS that ships without tools to make apps for it is not an Operating System but rather an Appliance System.
And, for those who will reply "but my disk space and all the bloat of a compiler onboard methodology" - well that'd be a next step: destroy the bloat.
What counts as the glory days of computation? On HN it’s probably having a great deal of control and ownership over our systems. I’m not sure that’s what most people would consider glory though.
I work with digitalisation in the public sector of Denmark, one of the most digitised countries in the world. We have thousands of employees and citizens who interact with our systems on a daily basis and when we benchmark them on what they want public sector software to be like they unanimously tell us they want it to be more like the iOS experience.
They simply don’t want technology to get in the way, and they don’t care that the price for this is ownership and freedom. For them the glory days won’t begin until they can get completely away from the operation systems and applications of “old”.
For the % of people who care about “bloat” and think the solution is hand rolling all their own tools? This train is only going in one direction and that station was passed 35 years ago
The world's iterated since those glory, early/pre-Internet days. These days, many (most?) computer users stay inside one application practically the entire time - a web-browser. A web browser that can access the Internet is enough to make "apps" that are online and accessible to the whole world, with the help of sites like Glitch.com.
For purists, even just a web browser and a basic text editor is enough to write programs that can be run locally, and without Internet access. (Additional tooling/libraries still helps immensely though.)
Having (access to) a compiler is not the missing linchpin it once was.
I really liked Sugar OS[0], and its on-device access to the code running the OS on the device, and how hackable that made the resulting device.
Not compiling but Windows ships with VBScript, JS, and Powershell, all with the ability to interface with the OS. I used VBScript for the first time a while ago to make a step in a batch process and it was pretty convenient.
Also every release of the .NET framework to my knowledge ships with the "csc.exe" and "vbc.exe" compilers. So C# and Visual Basic.NET are available out of the box with modern versions of Windows as well. No IDE support, but you could whip up quick hello worlds with notepad without breaking a sweat.
Right. But we are talking about how modern computers come with development systems too. While I'm sure the percentage of hobbyist programmers on modern machines is far smaller than in the 8-bit era, it's not like modern machines don't come with at least some development tools too.
An OS that ships without tools to make apps for it is not an Operating System but rather an Appliance System.
And, for those who will reply "but my disk space and all the bloat of a compiler onboard methodology" - well that'd be a next step: destroy the bloat.