Google Pulls Plug On Programming For the Masses 236
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the hacking-is-cancelled dept.
from the hacking-is-cancelled dept.
theodp writes "Google has decided to pull the plug on Android App Inventor, which was once touted as a game-changer for introductory computer science. In an odd post, Google encourages folks to 'Get Started!' with the very product it's announcing will be discontinued as a Google product. The move leaves CS Prof David Wolber baffled. ' In the case of App Inventor,' writes Wolber, 'the decision affects more than just your typical early adopter techie. It hurts kids and schools, and outfits like Iridescent, who use App Inventor in their Technovation after-school programs for high school girls, and Youth Radio's Mobile Action Lab, which teaches app building to kids in Oakland California. You've hurt professors and K-12 educators who have developed new courses and curricula with App Inventor at the core. You've hurt universities who have redesigned their programs.' Wolber adds: 'Even looking at it from Google's perspective, I find the decision puzzling. App Inventor was a public relations dream. Democratizing app building, empowering kids, women, and underrepresented groups — this is good press for a company continually in the news for anti-trust and other far less appealing issues. And the cost-benefit of the cut was negligible-believe it or not, App Inventor was a small team of just 5+ employees! The Math doesn't make sense.'"
So simple (Score:4, Funny)
Democratizing app building, empowering kids, women, and underrepresented groups
So simple, even a woman can do it.
Re:Where is the need... (Score:5, Funny)
I said this when it came out and I'll say it again - where is the real demand for this from these people the author is quoting?
Supposedly that demand is the result of anti-kid / anti-woman in other dev tools. Ah that must be emacs with its "kitchen sink" comparisons, you know, keep em barefoot, pregnant and in the KITCHEN. Of course then there is vi. My guess is vi is anti-child, because you hit escape about every 5th keystroke, and everyone knows from horror movies that some mass murder ESCAPEs and kills all the teenagers in the movie. As for perl, well you got the camel book, and camels are from the middle east, and they're not known for their feminist outlook on life.
Re:It has been seen before (Score:3, Funny)
[tldr; jesus fuck, that summary was annoying]
don't mess with the Bull (Score:5, Funny)
> And the cost-benefit of the cut was negligible-believe it or not, App Inventor was a small team of just 5+ employees! The Math doesn't make sense.'"
One of those 5 employees parked in Sergey Brin's parking spot. The rest was inevitable.
It's Very Clear What Google Is Doing Here (Score:5, Funny)
from TFA:
"With the winding down of Google Labs, Google will discontinue App Inventor as a Google product and will open source the code. Additionally, because of App Inventor’s success in the education space, we are exploring opportunities to support the educational use of App Inventor on an open source platform."
I think it's pretty obvious what happened here. Because of close brushes with violating their "do no evil" mantra, Larry and Sergey have actually perfected time travel in order to ensure that no present actions result in future evil.
... and then, one fateful morning, as a particularly evil hacker was using App Inventor to build a smarter botnet he had the idea to use App Inventor to create an App that simply used App Inventor to progenate. And he succeeded in making it 0.000001% smarter than he himself was. And so it set out using App Inventor to make more programs that used App Inventor to make programs that were 0.000001% smarter than their parent program.
.NET Inventor overtook it.
As a result, the first subject has been sent into the future to report back only negative results from Google's products. When he returned beaten and battered and bruised, he declared that support and extensions of the App Inventor must be halted. Instead of assisting in learning, App Inventor gave uneducated kids the power of super hackers -- creating applications that could be viruses and malware. The explosion of malware on mobile phones sent markets reeling and devastated the world economy
Nothing to fear, right? RIGHT?
A few quadrillion iterations later (which Google's servers handled without any problem) and App Inventor had infected every system in the world. The result was a super brilliant application that could predict and see everything by harnessing the computation power of every implemented Turing Machine in the world. Therefore, Google had to kill App Inventor now while it still had the chance.
Larry and Sergey debated for hours whether App Inventor was inherently evil or the application of App Inventor. What was worse, was that Larry was convinced that if App Inventor was not left to run its course then mankind would face an even more evil post-apocalyptic future past that when Microsoft's
And so they came up with a simple, elegant solution that would shift all the blame onto the entire world should App Inventor become the end of mankind: open source it.
Does President Obama know about this? (Score:4, Funny)