Go back fifty years, and you needed a Ph.D. to program a computer. At the end of the 1960s, virtually the only institutions with programmable computers were the military and top-tier universities. In the 1980s, programming got easier. You still needed a degree in it to do it well, but the rise of the personal computer made it a lot more accessible.
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Things, however, began to change around a decade ago when program designers realized that they could, to some extent, layer up the process of creating software, allowing somebody without any formal training whatsoever do it.
From the point on, anyone could become a programmer without having to understand an “IF OR” statement or even know what programming fundamentally was.
Making Programming Fun
Most people aren’t going to voluntary code database software or banking apps. It’s boring. But when there are games involves, you can get people to do pretty much anything.
Take Roll20, for instance. Roll20 is a piece of software that makes it easy for people to design their own tabletop games in digital environments – think Dungeons and Dragons board games, but in a digital, rather than physical, environment. The software not only gives players impressive flexibility in how they design and set up their games (just like the physical equivalent), but it also makes creating virtual environments intuitive, like Minecraft. You can pick up the basic concepts in an afternoon and become truly pro after a couple of months of concerted effort.
Programming isn’t usually fun. If you’ve ever tried to create anything in Python, you’ll know just how brutal programming can be. A single extra space or misplaced comma can mean the difference between a program that works and one that continually crashes or won’t run at all.
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All The Answers Are Online
Okay, let’s suppose you decide that you don’t want to use a software tool that smartly directs your programming; you want to get down into the source code. It should be a challenge, right?
Well, it used to be, but not anymore. All that you have to do these days is type your question into Google and get an answer quickly. Quora is an excellent resource too.
Create Interesting Features With Only A Few Keystrokes
If you’ve ever coded a form on an HTML website, you’ll know that the programming language makes things rather easy for you. You just tell it that you’d like to create a field, and it’ll provide a syntactic template for you. There’s no need to program in the boxes or anything like that: you just tell HTML that you want to make a form, and it’ll give you a nice and simple framework in which to do that.
The same goes for programming in general. Higher level operations now allow you to do things like draw GUIs, play video and audio, and control your robot vacuum.
There’s no doubt that programming is becoming easier and more intuitive. The higher the level of the programming, the lower the degree of customization. But for some, this tradeoff will be worth it.
