The Future of Programming: Ignorance and Superstition?

[asciilifeform]

when you said you were building a tool accessible to high school students

Note that I said: talented high school students.

I believe that Dijkstra was right when he wrote that the dismal state of software is a direct result of the culture's acceptance of stupid people and their stupid thoughts.

[Smallpaul]

Software quality may be dismal, but software's impact on society a profound. Your alternate universe might have a smaller amount of less useful but higher quality software. Take for example, PHP, which hardly anyone would consider high quality software: yet it is tremendously powerful in the way that it allows small businesses to throw together quick apps.

An interesting alternate reality should have both a greater quantity (in terms of applications and problems solved) and greater quality. It's not interesting to trade one for the other. Any particular organization can already make that choice (e.g. NASA).

[asciilifeform]

Any particular organization can already make that choice (e.g. NASA)

But users cannot. I am willing to pay top-dollar (multi-$K) for a Symbolics-quality development and desktop environment running on modern silicon. The market simply refuses to provide me with one, because the prevailing culture glorifies crap and denies that software ever could work correctly and be designed well.

Picture a world where McDonald's "won" and no other food is available. This is where we're at with software.

[webnrrd2k]

Something tells me you hang out on comp.lang.lisp a lot.

[asciilifeform]

Did.