So this was my original review in Max's Article of the Week:
<aside> 💬 I adored this article. I've sent this to a bunch of people who had considered learning to code but had admitted to me: "why should I learn to code if I'm never going to get a job as a programmer"? This article brushes this aside: simple, hyper-specialised software built for friends and family, free from sudden redesigns, ads and bloat, are incredibly valuable. The fact that this was written by a professional author, not a software engineer, who is using his skills to help his partner sell olive oil, to create music for his audiobook, and create video chat apps for his immediate family, reminds me of the playful attitude I had when first learning how to program.
</aside>
It also reminded me of
https://twitter.com/mrcatacroquer/status/1386318806411325440
Stallman immediately gets quoted verbatim.
Now, some of you may not ever write computer programs, but perhaps you cook. And if you cook, unless you're really great, you probably use recipes. And, if you use recipes, you've probably had the experience of getting a copy of a recipe from a friend who's sharing it. And you've probably also had the experience — unless you're a total neophyte — of changing a recipe. You know, it says certain things, but you don't have to do exactly that. You can leave out some ingredients. Add some mushrooms, 'cause you like mushrooms. Put in less salt because your doctor said you should cut down on salt — whatever. You can even make bigger changes according to your skill. And if you've made changes in a recipe, and you cook it for your friends, and they like it, one of your friends might say, “Hey, could I have the recipe?” And then, what do you do? You could write down your modified version of the recipe and make a copy for your friend. These are the natural things to do with functionally useful recipes of any kind. Now a recipe is a lot like a computer program. A computer program's a lot like a recipe: a series of steps to be carried out to get some result that you want. So it's just as natural to do those same things with computer programs — hand a copy to your friend. Make changes in it because the job it was written to do isn't exactly what you want. It did a great job for somebody else, but your job is a different job. And after you've changed it, that's likely to be useful for other people. Maybe they have a job to do that's like the job you do. So they ask, “Hey, can I have a copy?” Of course, if you're a nice person, you're going to give a copy. That's the way to be a decent person.
A pessimistic view of the current situation.
I remember the fantasy that more and more people would be able to develop simple basic apps for their own very personal customized needs. It was a vision of a more accessible and democratic compute infrastructure, where we'd all be 'makers' creating the compute environment we lived in. Things like hypercard were part of this vision. Those days are gone. The article doesn't explicitly mention the fact we all know: Very few people have the capacity to create a 'home-cooked meal' like the OP, for their own use. In fact much fewer than could create a little hypercard app. It's a world where there are pretty large barriers to most people being software 'makers', and instead we are just consumers who can choose from what is offered to us by various companies trying to figure out how to monetize our needs and desires. Part of it is the increased complexity of app development. Part of it is the walled gardens of our suppliers. I distributed the app to my family using TestFlight, and in TestFlight it shall remain forever: a cozy, eternal beta. Indeed. Because the very infrastruture ignores the needs of one-off "home cooked meal" apps, it assumes they don't exist, you have to pretend it is some kind of "beta" of a mass market commodified product instead (and be glad our suppliers still let you do that for 'free'). Our computers (increasingly the phone/device is people's primary computer) are no longer ours to do with as we will. It is sad. If those who created the computing revolution 30 years ago (including prior versions of us) could see where it wound up.... the level of technological sophisitication of our pocket audio-video-geolocated-self-surveilling-communicating devices is astounding; the lack of 'empowerment' or control we have over them is utterly depressing.
This got linked by a commenter:
https://twitter.com/geoffreylitt/status/1177607448682582016
He talks about Dynamicland at the end of the thread of the Twitter thread.
A commenter talks about why HyperCard died.
And our current culture contributes to both of these issues. We got the kind of computing that fits that culture, which is one that emphasizes profit making over other types of activity, and one soaked through with short term thinking. We need well funded basic research (to create computing media systems in the spirit of hypercard et al) and companies willing to push malleable computing systems out to their customers. Hypercard was extremely popular in its day, and Apple let it die on the vine. It's because they didn't know what to do with it -- the culture had become about shrinkwrapped solutions, and it no longer made sense.