> Once upon a time, one could download visual studio, click about to make a new project in (e.g.) Visual Basic, draw a gui in the gui editor, and click the run button
The world that lived behind that experience - COM & Active X Controls - was extremely complex. If you needed to build a new active x control for your app, god save you.
It's been said a million times, but in programming there is always complexity. Sometimes it is just well hidden.
I think there's a difference between intrinsic complexity and accidental complexity, though.
You're right to observe that programming involves irreducible complexity (one of the reasons why so many low code/no code tools fail is the refusal to accept this, imo), on the other hand modern toolchains are extremely complicated and could be a little more streamlined.
It's a meme at this point, but there's no way having six different pythons on your machine or whatever the hell modern JS toolchains do -- just to pick two examples -- is the simplest it can possibly be.
Older machines and toolchains certainly had their problems (arguably even worse ones), but I completely understand the complaints.
The complexity of modern tool-chains suck, specially when you are just beginning. It gets you very confused, and some people end just giving up. Python is confusing with all the environment juggling if you're at the stage of doing something not trivial. But for the beginner, at least it gives you IDLE, a barebones IDE by default. I think there is a parallel universe where I use Ruby as my main language, instead of Python, as I tried Ruby before Python, several years ago. But in this timeline I got stuck trying to call the Ruby interpreter from Geany, and never came back.
Similarly, I tried to learn Clojure before Pharo. Spent over a hour setting Atom with all dependencies required to convert the editor into a Clojure IDE. But I botched the set-up somewhere, and ended with a dead REPL. Again, never came back.
The best experience I had so far, as a beginner trying a new programming language, was Pharo. You type a couple of lines in the terminal, and gets a full environment with _everything_ you need included in the system image. No need to spending a lot of time wrangling dependencies to get a functional system. I think the image-based development strategy from the Smalltalks is underrated.
Thank you for posting this. I’ve had the same experience with Clojure and was wondering whether to try Pharo. So I did a search on HN and your comment came up, written no 24 hours before. Jung would have called this a synchronicity, or “meaningful coincidence”.
The world that lived behind that experience - COM & Active X Controls - was extremely complex. If you needed to build a new active x control for your app, god save you.
It's been said a million times, but in programming there is always complexity. Sometimes it is just well hidden.