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> The same tired argument has been made every decade since the 70s One of my father's COBOL books from the punch-card days has a similar sales pitch about Engl
by strken 9y ago
> The same tired argument has been made every decade since the 70s
One of my father's COBOL books from the punch-card days has a similar sales pitch about English-like syntax and ordinary people becoming programmers.
- monsieurbanana 9y agoOrdinary people have become programmers. What people do now with, for example, excel, was certainly once reserved to people with programming skills.
- collyw 9y agoI have needed to clean up the crap in those Excels afterwards and put them into a proper production database. Ordinary people have not become programmers.
- darepublic 9y agoPeople are becoming less detail oriented. They are willing to close their eyes and fall backwards and trust that engineered goodness will catch them.
- philipov 9y agoSure they have. They have become bad programmers.
- TimJYoung 9y agoOrdinary people (non-programmers) have been doing fairly complex spreadsheets since the 80s. My dad, a cost accountant, was born in 1934 and was a Lotus 123/Quattro Pro master by the late 80s/early 90s.