Wednesday, May 01, 2013

Whatever happened to The Easy to Use Programming Languages?

It is my personal fervent belief that Not just M$, but all The Principle Computer Manufactures, & Somehow all Additional Independent Programmers have conspired to Bury all The Easy to Use Programming Languages.

Not so long ago; Only 15 years or so ago; There were literally hundreds of Programming Languages, all of they easy to learn & use, & now The Only ( One! ) Programming Language that is available is some Variation on C++, or You have to already be fluent in C++ to program some other ‘Easy’ & ‘Simple’ programming Language.

One of The Really Easy & Fun Programming Languages, Scratch; recently came out with its long awaited Scratch 2.0 & there are NO new features.
The Chat Rooms associated with The Scratch Platform have been piling on hundreds, if not thousands of Suggestions for what The New Version would contain, & The Final Release included NONE of them.

In fact there was a huge step back, in that you can no longer download The New version & use it on your own computer ( ! ) You can only use it On-Line, Storing all your programs on The Site, allowing them to Censor your Programs, if they turn out to be too useful. Not surprisingly; M$ is a big funder of this Project at MIT, & one must wonder why, after it’s very promising release several years ago, This project has been essentially killed.
Originally; Scratch was meant for Very Young Children; But naturally; Many Adults discovered it & began writing some very clever programs with it. There are several things about Scratch that makes doing ‘Complicated’ things difficult, & its very slow, even in Turbo Mode, But all this makes it more challenging & Hobbyists that love to fiddle with such things are not going to be detoured by a few Integrated System Anomalies & Bugs.
Clearly; Scratch had demonstrated that even with all these built in limitations, it was still too dangerous to allow anyone, even children from actually writing programs with it.

Google Recently released a Programming Language that was ostensibly intended to allow dumb people to write Android Programs with a Language that Google Described as pretty much like BASIC, one of The oldest programming languages that every computer sold in The late 70’s came with. It was very easy to use. Any attentive 12 year old could master BASIC in a few evenings.
This New Programming Language by Google Called ‘Simple’ is anything but.
i tried downloading it & discovered that you need to understand how to program in Unix to even open it.
It is Not a Stand Alone Application.
It will only work inside Unix Shells, something that i’ve never been able to figure out. And whenever i tried to ask about this, The people to ‘Understand’ this, are apparently unable to ‘Explain’ it, because it is so Complicated that they will invariably leave out dozens of steps that they think are too Obvious to mention. And then if you try to get them explain these missing steps, they will become flustered & quit trying to explain it, as they come to believe that i am an imbecile.

The Macintosh comes with Several Different ‘Programming’ Languages, AppleScript, Python, X_Code, Dashcode, & Others; But none of them are actually ‘Supported’ by Apple. Although The Apple Stores will have Symposiums on how to use Their Computers, They don’t have any to even introduce these Languages. Even The Local Apple Club shuns any mention of these Languages & Offers no support for anyone interested in them. There are some books on them, But as mentioned earlier, they invariably assume that you are already fluent in C++ or Assembler.

You hear about 12 & 13 year olds writing all these clever apps, but i have no idea where they are learning these languages.
Maybe it’s all a hoax of somekind ?

None of The Young People i know have been taught any programming languages in School,
So again; Where are they getting this from?

Apple & Youtube do have ‘Videos’ & Websites that ostensibly provide The Curious Aspiring Programmer to learn these Languages, But they either Assume that you already know all The Terminology & Details, or Worse; Jump over things that The Video has Determined to be too complicated to Explain, so they just leave it out.
Or The Videos are broken up into tiny little fragments, each one that explains ( ? ) something in a contextual vacuum, & requires you to click, click, click through dozens or hundreds of these videos, each of which is a completely independent fragment, unconnected to anything else.

Even The (x for Idiots ( or Dummies ) assume that you already know all The Terminology that not referenced in any standard dictionary or even Apple’s Dictionary on their Computers.

i just want a simple language to manipulate text & draw some simple pictures.
Why does this scare The Computer Industry so much ?

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