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The problem with end user programming is that no matter how much easier you try to make the interface to use, programming requires some ability to think logical

The problem with end user programming is that no matter how much easier you try to make the interface to use, programming requires some ability to think logically and understand systems and anybody who can do that is going to get frustrated by guard rails and just want to do ‘real’ programming eventually. There’s never going to be the magic interface that unlocks coding for everyone because most people just don’t think that way and the people that do, don’t need a more intuitive interface. Which isn’t to say that quality of life improvements aren’t important, I just don’t think they’ll turn non-programmers to programmers in any great number.

rhn_mk1 8y ago
> anybody who can do that is going to get frustrated by guard rails and just want to do ‘real’ programming eventually I think that's the property which is worth fighting for. If those people would not try programming at all otherwise, providing them with a dumbed down ramp leading to frustration and graduating may actually result in non-programmers turning into programmers in greater numbers.
mindslight 8y ago
The existence of eg massively customized Excel spreadsheets say otherwise. Every sufficiently advanced program already needs a consistent model of objects, manipulations that can be done on them, etc. The skill of seeing a pattern of manipulation and wanting to abstract it may not be universal, but it's a larger category than the motivation to pick up a general purpose programing language from square one.
- lixtra 8y ago
  >> There’s never going to be the magic interface that unlocks coding for everyone because > The existence of eg massively customized Excel spreadsheets say otherwise. But those sheets are far from being maintained by everyone. Or was it about: >> just want to do ‘real’ programming eventually Which is why Excel has this huge programming support.
blotter_paper 8y ago
>There’s never going to be the magic interface that unlocks coding for everyone because most people just don’t think that way and the people that do, don’t need a more intuitive interface. Strongly disagree. The "magic" interface will be a machine that understands verbal instructions well enough to convert them into logic, figure out which cases are undefined and non-obvious, and then ask clarifying questions. I'm not saying we'll necessarily get there in 10 years, but barring civilizational collapse we should get there in n years. It's both useful and theoretically possible, so we will eventually build it.
- carapace 8y ago
  > a machine that understands verbal instructions well enough to convert them into logic, figure out which cases are undefined and non-obvious, and then ask clarifying questions. Prolog can do that (once the audio has been converted to text anyway.)
  - 0815test 8y ago
    no.
    - carapace 8y ago
      Ha ha ha! Good one. I'm thinking of the interactive debugger described in "Art of Prolog" hooked up to e.g. Siri/Alexa-style VOX interface. The user would need some training, and you would need some glue logic of course, but I bet it would work pretty well.
- empath75 8y ago
  Sure when we have general intelligence they can do the coding, but those people won’t be doing coding any more than the guy submitting a feature request in Jira is doing coding.
  - blotter_paper 8y ago
    General AI isn't necessarily necessary for this, though it could be what brings it. And I suppose I never compile anything since I don't do it by hand? Why bark when you have a script?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ryukafalz 8y ago
>and anybody who can do that is going to get frustrated by guard rails and just want to do ‘real’ programming eventually. Sure, if there are guard rails. But ideally the environment available to them is the same environment (at least most of) the system itself is written in; it shouldn’t be dumbed down, just more approachable. >and the people that do, don’t need a more intuitive interface. We may not need it, but it sure does help. As a concrete example, I was using an Emacs media player interface a while back and was frustrated with how it responded to mouse clicks. Were it a different media player (even if it were free software) I likely would have just accepted it and moved on. But Emacs does this sort of end-user programming pretty well (once you’re over the learning curve of using Emacs itself) and I was able to quickly trace why it was behaving the way it did and patch the offending code.
indymike 8y ago
Modern web apps and containerized web apps aren't user programmable. It's hard to do secure and user programmable in most web apps. Old school GUI apps are often programmable via some interpreter embedded in the application or via apis that can be called from other programs. Lots of people would use these features to automate little tasks... there's just nothing there for web apps. Easy deployment, no maintenance > user programmable.

rhn_mk1 8y ago

> anybody who can do that is going to get frustrated by guard rails and just want to do ‘real’ programming eventually I think that's the property which is worth fighting for. If those people would not try programming at all otherwise, providing them with a dumbed down ramp leading to frustration and graduating may actually result in non-programmers turning into programmers in greater numbers.

mindslight 8y ago

The existence of eg massively customized Excel spreadsheets say otherwise. Every sufficiently advanced program already needs a consistent model of objects, manipulations that can be done on them, etc. The skill of seeing a pattern of manipulation and wanting to abstract it may not be universal, but it's a larger category than the motivation to pick up a general purpose programing language from square one.

lixtra 8y ago
>> There’s never going to be the magic interface that unlocks coding for everyone because > The existence of eg massively customized Excel spreadsheets say otherwise. But those sheets are far from being maintained by everyone. Or was it about: >> just want to do ‘real’ programming eventually Which is why Excel has this huge programming support.

blotter_paper 8y ago

>There’s never going to be the magic interface that unlocks coding for everyone because most people just don’t think that way and the people that do, don’t need a more intuitive interface. Strongly disagree. The "magic" interface will be a machine that understands verbal instructions well enough to convert them into logic, figure out which cases are undefined and non-obvious, and then ask clarifying questions. I'm not saying we'll necessarily get there in 10 years, but barring civilizational collapse we should get there in n years. It's both useful and theoretically possible, so we will eventually build it.

carapace 8y ago
> a machine that understands verbal instructions well enough to convert them into logic, figure out which cases are undefined and non-obvious, and then ask clarifying questions. Prolog can do that (once the audio has been converted to text anyway.)
- 0815test 8y ago
  no.
  - carapace 8y ago
    Ha ha ha! Good one. I'm thinking of the interactive debugger described in "Art of Prolog" hooked up to e.g. Siri/Alexa-style VOX interface. The user would need some training, and you would need some glue logic of course, but I bet it would work pretty well.
empath75 8y ago
Sure when we have general intelligence they can do the coding, but those people won’t be doing coding any more than the guy submitting a feature request in Jira is doing coding.
- blotter_paper 8y ago
  General AI isn't necessarily necessary for this, though it could be what brings it. And I suppose I never compile anything since I don't do it by hand? Why bark when you have a script?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ryukafalz 8y ago

>and anybody who can do that is going to get frustrated by guard rails and just want to do ‘real’ programming eventually. Sure, if there are guard rails. But ideally the environment available to them is the same environment (at least most of) the system itself is written in; it shouldn’t be dumbed down, just more approachable. >and the people that do, don’t need a more intuitive interface. We may not need it, but it sure does help. As a concrete example, I was using an Emacs media player interface a while back and was frustrated with how it responded to mouse clicks. Were it a different media player (even if it were free software) I likely would have just accepted it and moved on. But Emacs does this sort of end-user programming pretty well (once you’re over the learning curve of using Emacs itself) and I was able to quickly trace why it was behaving the way it did and patch the offending code.

indymike 8y ago

Modern web apps and containerized web apps aren't user programmable. It's hard to do secure and user programmable in most web apps. Old school GUI apps are often programmable via some interpreter embedded in the application or via apis that can be called from other programs. Lots of people would use these features to automate little tasks... there's just nothing there for web apps. Easy deployment, no maintenance > user programmable.