yjsoon

You idiots. What actually matters isn’t the lack of Flash, or the lack of a camera, or the lack of multi-tasking, or the stupid name. What actually matters is that I can give this device to my parents and they’ll be able to use it without knowing what a goddamn filesystem is. What actually matters is that this might redefine the computing experience. Whether that’s a good thing or not, I’ll let you decide based on what some smart people have written below, but what matters is that something’s finally happened to change the face of personal computing. I can’t wait.

Alex Payne:

The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours without waking my parents. The iPad may be a boon to traditional eduction, insofar as it allows for multimedia textbooks and such, but in its current form, it’s a detriment to the sort of hacker culture that has propelled the digital economy.

Steven Frank:

We learned about computers from the inside out. Many of us became interested in computers because they were hackable, open, and without restrictions. We worry that these New World devices are stifling the next generation of programmers. But can anyone point to evidence that that’s really happening? I don’t know about you, but I see more people carrying handheld computers than at any point in history. If even a small percentage of them are interested in “what makes this thing tick?” then we’ve got quite a few new programmers in the pipeline.

Rory Marinich:

But however will children learn how to program? Simple: We will make them applications that teach them how to program. Every kid wants to make video games and Google, so it’s not like having a closed system will make them forget that such things are possible. When they go to learn, however, they will not learn by wasting their time doing things that will never make them happy in life. Instead, they will go to the carefully-screened App Store, and they will search for “How do I make video games”, and they will find a little button that teaches them and gives them a run-time environment in which to tinker. And because the iPad is so elegant and makes elegance so relatively easy, these apps will be elegant. We won’t get a row of advanced text editors too complex for people to understand. We will have a lot of simple, easy things that show us how joyful it is to tinker around, and that reveal their complexity and power as we learn enough to work at that level. I might even try my hand at something like that myself.