Star Trek (2009) came out 13 years ago.

I barely recall.

Star Trek (2009) was a bad movie, if I recall correctly.

Star Trek (2009) has the same plot as Tom Corbett, Space Cadet.

Just realized my blog homepage has a transfer size under 10KB. That's neat.

Even my podcast site transfers less than a quarter meg on first load.

@anthk I haven't thought about TCL+TK in ages. Is it even still a thing?

Smartphones and tablets are here to stay. GUIs are a part of life.

The solution isn't to push users back to the command line. The solution must be to bring composability to the graphical environment.

@rolltime @ACTupper Zapier is neat. Macros for the internet.

I wish more desktop applications supported a basic macro workflow.

There can be a better way.

@ACTupper it's a great introduction to programming.

It is not a good tool for empowering non-programmers.

Part of the problem is one of approachability.

BASIC still works, you know? I wrote programs in FreeBASIC as a kid.

Python is out there, and is fairly easy to get started with, and there are plenty of good guides and tutorials.

But they are not *approachable* you know?

And then there's the whole issue of GUIs.

I have never written a graphical application using a UI framework.

I've started some, but working with UI frameworks sucks. I can't imagine starting with one for my first application.

I've done web UIs for years, and they aren't *easy* but they're way easier than working with modern UI frameworks.

Which, I guess, is why Electron is so popular.

In the 80s, my aunt (a child) and my grandmother (someone who, today, can't even effectively operate her Television) wrote a series of computer programs from which they ran my grandfather's business.

They generated invoices and printed them, scheduled jobs, kept a list of customers, etc.

They did it all with an Atari 8-bit computer, and the included BASIC.

Today, I know a lot of business people who do the kinds of things I would write software for using Excel or Access and macros.

But it's mostly boring business stuff.

My mom used to weave batch files and sidekick databases in to something resembling a computer program.

I used to go off about hypercard a lot.

It was a tool, scarcely more complicated than Powerpoint, that enabled anyone who chose to to make programs that do things.

It is absurd that there are not simpler ways for non-programmers to make computers do what they want.

There were a few years when I was a kid in which my family was actually pretty well off, but that was the exception, rather than the rule.

After my little brother was born, money was tight. After my parents split, it got tighter.

My Grandmother worked at Walmart, and had previously done a lot of work with small kids. As a result, we had lots of Boxes. She'd bring home boxes that had held cheese (perfect size for Atari 2600 cartridge storage) and boxes that had held all manner of other things.

These were normally thick chip board, or otherwise not corrugated. The ones that were interior boxes from inside other packaging would also frequently be devoid of printing of any kind.

Do you understand what this meant?

Cities.

It meant cities.

I turned these boxes in to buildings and scattered them throughout her house.

I made roads and ramps and elevated crossings and just Covered the world.

But yeah, He-Man.

The New Adventures of He-Man

Look at this obviously not he-man imposter.

And I was always the kind of kid that went for a big multipack of cheap crappy toys, you know?

Like, I never owned any 3 3/4 GI Joes, or if I did I got them second hand, but I'd get the Lanard Corps. Space Crew mutlipacks from Walmart once every few months. For the same price as one Licensed action figure, I'd get like 15 generic space guys and stage massive battles that spanned an entire house.