Besides the educational value mentioned elsewhere, by browsing the web you're promiscuously executing code sent by random strangers, with whom you have no long-term relationship. It's important to be able to review what comes from them. View Source and dev panel are, and forever should be, an important part of the browser.

How do non-nerds become nerds? "View source" can be the lid of the pandora's box for lots of young people who become inspired to be developers.

Alos the web is not just for nerds! HTML is a language that lots of everyday people can write now - it is empowering.

We were already nerds for a few decades before the browser was invented.

And we (my generation) weren't!

"View Source" is not the only way to start on your way to nerddom, but it is, or at least was at some point in time, an important one.

An opposing data point: I can't recall the last time I used a physical programming book for anything other than a monitor riser (being so thick, they're fantastic for this). And I am from the generation where those books were how you learned to program.

Every resource I consume today is either in HTML or PDF form.

Maybe, but why not all of that? And some more?

Two other things that helped push me into the nerd side when I was a kid:

- QBasic shipping with the OS on my first computer

- Video games that shipped with map editors (Abuse, StarCraft, Unreal Tournament - the latter actually gave access to most of the source code through it)

I'm in favour of everything that exposes the inner workings of computers. Software, in particular, shouldn't be a black box, even if 99% of the time everyone (developers included) treat it as such.

What about the newer nerds who don't have grey beards?

Take a nerd class in high school. Go to nerd university.

None apart from that.. but the freedom to easily tinker and understand whats going on has massive impacts on the industry in the long term.

Technology is becoming easier to use, but more sophisticated and more of a blackbox so much harder to understand or replicate. Higher barriers to entry in the market, more power to existing gatekeepers. Fewer and fewer people will understand enough to wield influence and those people will be employed by big companies for tons of money. It shifts the balance of power and only a select few people can expect to have a big impact.

Simple example - imagine Google was as easy to replicate as it was in the very beginning. If you disliked the direction ads & privacy are heading, maybe 4-5 people could make their own search engine just as good with more privacy rights and less creepy tracking. Now it will take 100 people and billions of dollars to even get close...

barriers to entry go up => resources required to compete with existing players go way up => existing players get more power => existing players abuse power. Ahh the business cycle.

Most things suck. Interactive environments where the user can inspect the software they are running, and even change it on the fly, is what all computing environments ought to be like. We should be empowering computer users and making it easy to look under the hood.

> I mean, you can't 'View Source' anything of the computer the browser is running on, or the browser itself.

Says you:-)

When I'm running SLIME in emacs talking to SBCL, I can type M-. to look up definitions of SLIME elisp, Swank Lisp and so forth, all the way into emacs's C core and the SBCL internals (more Lisp code). This sort of capability has existed since the 80s at least, and maybe even further back.

Yes, yes, I know: I sound like a broken record, extolling the capabilities dynamic systems give one. But they're awesome, and they've been around forever, and they're well-tested, and they perform well enough. It really is a shame the tech world keeps on chasing the new & shiny (and half-baked) instead of improving the wonderful stuff we've had for decades.

Learning: I learned a big deal of web development (HTML, CSS and JS) from view-source. Tweaking: I sometimes fix broken closed-source/proprietary applications or websites by checking the source and writing a user script. Those two can probably fall into the "Nerd" category, though...

When I was a kid and started doing that, I thought that the compiled scripts were written like this, and I was fascinated (and terrified) by how complex they were.

I recall being both impressed by the complexity and either annoyed or impressed by how well formatted the raw HTML output was.

"How can they possibly stand to work on this when it's all jumbled together on one line??"

I would manually pretty-print so I could actually read what was going on, and now I still like to output tidier HTML when I can, even if no one is ever going to see it.

The Web has more reach than any publishing medium in human history (number and variety of consumers, producers, devices, industries, languages, etc.) Many features combine to make it so, and "view source" is one of them.

presumably, the parent commenter laments that you cannot easily decipher the code that drives today's webapps, where as yester-decade's webapp's view-source is simple to decipher (and presumably, learn/copy from).