Infants, Rodents and Blind People
Jurgen Appelo just bodychecked Web 2.0.
I should just repost the whole thing, but I’ll pick and choose the very best parts. Everyone should simply go over there and read it.
Have you noticed that, with the exception of infants, rodents and blind people, the whole world has picked up the hobby of digital photography?
As an aside, Hajra is on DeviantArt, and a non-scientific but long survey backs up Jurgen’s claims.
It’s very different for software developers. Programmers are like novelists, movie directors, and traditional painters. The barrier to entry is high because the work is hard, complicated, and requires craftsmanship. Nobody among my friends is silly enough to “give programming a try”. It’s much easier for them to take pictures, write poems, or to empty a trash bin on the floor and call it modern art.
The only issue I’d take with this excellent, acerbic posting is that I “give programming a try” all the time. I did it back with XConq (C++ and whatever loonie scripting language it used), Bughunter (PHP), the Song Digital Gazeteer (SQL) and, lately, with Flash (Here’s yet another example that I won’t even explain). I think that barriers to entry have always defined the peer-produced media process, and while I agree that universal access to digital cameras reduces the novelty of photographs, it also allows for some pretty low-cost profile modeling. With the growth of beautiful vector graphics packages–And by that I mean Inkscape–which will finally provide low-barrier Turing complete functionality to the masses, as well as more and more intuitive (Though resource-hungry*) programming languages I think software development will steadily fall into the Poetry and Modern Art realm, and that should be a generally good thing. Except for those guys who still know Machine Language and insist we never needed to develop anything after COBOL. For them, it’ll suck, and they’ll probably take up residence next to the candlemakers and the film developers and complain about how today’s code doesn’t have that hand-crafted feel to it.
*But who cares? I’ve got processes to burn!!