<story><title>All the Technology but None of the Love</title><url>http://jacquesmattheij.com/all-of-the-tech-but-none-of-the-love/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cubano</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m an old-timer, and I can totally see where Jacques was trying to go with this essay, but in the end it pretty much missed the mark.&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think it&amp;#x27;s wonderful that the future I (we?) foresaw 25-30 years ago has come alive, albeit with many odd and sometimes disconcerting twists and nooks.&lt;p&gt;Remember the effort us lifers put into making tools that allowed &amp;quot;the masses&amp;quot; access to programming, like BASIC, Visual Basic, Turbo Pascal and all of that?  How can we now, with any credibility, bemoan the very future so many of us tried to build?&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;It’s a craft and an art, as much as people have been trying to make it into an industry, without creativity you can’t make good software.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m a semi-professional musician, and I&amp;#x27;ve been telling non-technical friends for a lifetime that programming hits of the same creative notes that playing guitar and writing music does, although they can never really feel what I&amp;#x27;m saying.</text></comment>
<story><title>All the Technology but None of the Love</title><url>http://jacquesmattheij.com/all-of-the-tech-but-none-of-the-love/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>marktangotango</author><text>This piece is rather tepid in my opinion.  The author bemoans a future that never came because of&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;an enormous influx of people into tech that are in it just for the money and that couldn’t give a damn about how they achieve their goals.&lt;p&gt;He continues talking about how things were harder in the old days, and how easy it is today, but paradoxically, too easy?&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;The barrier to entry was so high that those that made it across really knew their stuff.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;Of course that’s not what you want, you want all this to be as accessible as possible but real creativity starts when resources are limited.&lt;p&gt;It all seems like a variation on a theme Alan Kay addressed some time ago[1]:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;Computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were. So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;queue.acm.org&amp;#x2F;detail.cfm?id=1039523&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>