Microsoft Reaching Out To Hobbyists

From Computerworld comes a story about coding4fun, a site that MIcrosoft hopes will be a hub for hobbyist developers. It’s good to see the largest software company on the planet thinking again about how to make programming fun and accessible. This comes on the heels of Microsoft’s Express suite of cheaper versions of their core developer suites, which was also aimed at lowering the barrier to entry for programming. This will make things interesting–the coding4fun site is full of projects that used to be nearly exclusively the domain of open source, Java, and the other net.darlings. If there are low barriers to entry for both platforms, the differentiating factors will move to things like community passion, community openness, opportunities for fame, opportunities for money, and so on. Interesting times ahead …