I started programming over 20 years ago on an old Macintosh II computer that my father practically fished out of the trash at his job.<\/p>\n
I largely credit that old computer to where I am today — it wasn’t just the Macintosh’s ease-of-use and small learning curve, it was also, literally, the spirit<\/em> of the designers and tinkerers that worked at Apple computer that existed in that machine.<\/p>\n The Macintosh was a computer that you could delve beneath the surface, when you wanted to — you could modify code, the way applications worked, the modules and extensions that started up when the machine booted — you had, when you wanted to, access to all the tools that the designers themselves<\/em> used to create that very Macintosh you were using right then and there.<\/p>\n There’s a whole generation of programmers who got their start in this very way, and for that, I do have Apple to thank.<\/p>\n CELEBRATION OVER, CRITICISM BELOW:<\/p>\n And that’s the very reason why Apple’s current practices today kinda scare me. Apple’s products today are precisely not<\/em> about giving the user tools and control — with each new version of MacOSX, each new iPhone that comes out, there’s less and less that tinkerers like me can do with it.<\/p>\n There’s less and less that the next<\/em> generation of tinkerers can do with it. How would the next Steve Jobs design anything on an iPod Touch? On an iPad? How would a budding application developer get anyone to use a new application he’s designed, when people can only install apps via a curated, policed, application “store?”<\/p>\n I thank Apple for starting me<\/em> on the path to where I am today, but I thank companies like Google for keeping that spirit alive, when it becomes increasingly evident that Apple either isn’t able to or just no longer wants to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I started programming over 20 years ago on an old Macintosh II computer that my father practically fished out of the trash at his job. I largely credit that old computer to where I am today — it wasn’t just the Macintosh’s ease-of-use and small learning curve, it was also, literally, the spirit of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming","category-science-and-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2ZUZG-fV","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}