> We showed the above to playtesters (kids and parents) who told > us what we didn’t want to hear: the game looks complicated. That's because real programming

> We showed the above to playtesters (kids and parents) who told > us what we didn’t want to hear: the game looks complicated. That's because real programming is complicated. Software systems, with billions or even trillions of switch points, are the most complex things humans have ever built, by far. We have tried mightily, for many, many decades, to make programming simpler and more accessible. The problem: instructing a computer precisely and unambiguously what to do means you have to precisely and unambiguously specify...what to do! There's no getting around it, just like there's no way (yet) to write a novel without choosing words and pushing letter keys. The graphic approaches quickly get tedious beyond toy examples. Graphs are fine for telling your Lego robot what to do, but with the Web and app store overflowing with cool apps, the bar for grabbing and keeping a would-be programmer's attention is now quite high. My bet: non-programmers will "program" at scale when where's a fundamentally new computing model. Machine learning & deep learning are the most promising for this, I think: instead of telling the machine precisely what to do (and how), you show examples of the behavior you want and give feedback when it's wrong.