[FRIAM] Poll: Why is computing not fun any more? How can we bring the fun back?

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Owen wrote:
> Many will not agree, but it seems to me that programming and  
> computing is no where near as fun as it once was.
To do something new takes more imagination and work than it did in 10 or 
20 years ago.  No one is going to hack on a Turbo Pascal when there's 
Visual Studio and Eclipse.  Writing an word processor is pointless when 
there is Office 12.   Even small progress on such applications seems to 
take millions of dollars.  

These days, the satisfaction of mastery is harder to come by, because it 
is so much harder to grok a large software system, than it is, say, the 
ROM of an Apple //.   Way back when, even if the design of a program was 
odd, it was possible to really understand it all.   Now, with dozens or 
hundreds of programmers working on commodity software (and obvious, 
frankly boring objectives), there is plenty of `who cares' code.  Code 
that was not written by or for clever people, nor really expected to 
endure.   Who wants to study such code?  It's just a pain.  

To enjoy invention, I think it's necessary to acknowledge and invest in 
it.  Just as historical buildings are maintained and used, we should do 
the same with software.  One venue where this does happen is with 
Linux-based distributions, which of course include software that dates 
back decades (e.g. X11, GCC, Emacs, Perl).  

Marcus