4 ms·

I'd rather get to a world in which incompetents stop writing software.

• timwiseman 16y ago
  Agreed, but we will likely never get there (many professional programmers are incompetent, to say nothing of the amateurs that need to do little snippets, and there will always be beginners that are incompetent now just because they are learning to be competent). A concept like this, if it is possible, can work from the other way and help prevent the incompetents from being dangerous. I doubt it will ever prevent people from needing to do low level programming, abstractions leak as the article says. But if done well, it could help people with minimal knowledge create truly useful things. This would help free the truly skilled programmers to work on hard and important problems.
• olefoo 16y ago
  I would rather work towards a world where the tools were good enough and the common knowledge of the limits and capabilities of software widespread enough that professional competence is not required for most people to do the programming tasks that will make their lives better. To some extent we are already headed there, although many instances of end-user programming are not considered to be actual programming. Is someone setting variables in a profile editor programming? How about writing mail-filters? Scripting actions in a larger environment? Using an event recorder to create repeatable macros? I would say that all of those are in fact programming activities. And I'm fairly certain that there are a large number of people who would disagree. The thing is that once you look at things in that light, it changes the software you write for the better, it means you provide debugging tools in your application and you look at the softer layers of your application with an eye towards opening them up to end-users.