Re: Young people and computers
Gunnar Wolf <gwolf@gwolf.org> writes:
> And your home computer surely gave you better ways of engaging than a
> dumbphone does nowadays. "Getting connected" basically means consuming
> information or sharing lolcatz, or chatting. It is much harder (in my
> perception, which is anti-phone skewed) to jump from the "wow, I
> wonder how this is done" to peeking at the piece of code in a phone,
> even if it runs mostly free software, than on a traditional desktop.
This is sort of true, but a lot of mobile phone apps are actually web
pages, and the web is the one bit of commercial programming where you can
still look at other people's source to some extent. Also, a lot of the
services like Twitter provide web services APIs; still not great from a
free software perspective, but it means that you can build little apps
around the service to do things you want. I get the impression that a lot
of people are starting programming that way: building little bits of code
to wrap Twitter or Facebook APIs to do little automated things they want
to do.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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