TITLE: Is the Magic Gone? AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: April 04, 2020 11:37 AM DESC: ----- BODY: This passage from Remembering the LAN recalls an earlier time that feels familiar:

My father, a general practitioner, used this infrastructure of cheap 286s, 386s, and 486s (with three expensive laser printers) to write the medical record software for the business. It was used by a dozen doctors, a nurse, and receptionist. ...

The business story is even more astonishing. Here is a non-programming professional, who was able to build the software to run their small business in between shifts at their day job using skills learned from a book.

I wonder how many hobbyist programmers and side-hustle programmers of this sort there are today. Does programming attract people the way it did in the '70s or '80s? Life is so much easier than typing programs out of Byte or designing your own BASIC interpreter from scratch. So many great projects out on Github and the rest of the web to clone, mimic, adapt. I occasionally hear a student talking about their own projects in this way, but it's rare. As Crawshaw points out toward the end of his post, the world in which we program now is much more complex. It takes a lot more gumption to get started with projects that feel modern:

So much of programming today is busywork, or playing defense against a raging internet. You can do so much more, but the activation energy required to start writing fun collaborative software is so much higher you end up using some half-baked SaaS instead.

I am not a great example of this phenomenon -- Crawshaw and his dad did much more -- but even today I like to roll my own, just for me. I use a simple accounting system I've been slowly evolving for a decade, and I've cobbled together bits and pieces of my own tax software, not an integrated system, just what I need to scratch an itch each year. Then there are all the short programs and scripts I write for work to make Spreadsheet City more habitable. But I have multiple CS degrees and a lot of years of experience. I'm not a doctor who decides to implement what his or her office needs. I suspect there are more people today like Crawshaw's father than I hear about. I wish it were more of a culture that we cultivated for everyone. Not everyone wants to bake their own bread, but people who get the itch ought to feel like the world is theirs to explore. -----