> Sometimes I wonder if the people of the 1960s (i.e the people who came up with lisp, multics, unix) had the right idea: to use a computer you should program i

> Sometimes I wonder if the people of the 1960s (i.e the people who came up with lisp, multics, unix) had the right idea: to use a computer you should program it. It's the right attitude to take, but let's try to provide some definitions. What does it mean "to program"? Certainly we have contemporary ideas of what it all involves. But at the end of the day it's hard to come up with a more encompassing definition than "telling a computer what to do (and possibly what to do later)." This means that by merely "using" a computer (ie through a GUI or whatever -- manipulating it somehow) one is, by this definition, doing some kind of programming. With that definition in mind, we now see that the systems we have provided users are completely hamstrung. We have given them limited environments and languages (languages here being mostly of a visual/UI variety) to work with. What's worse is that we have goo examples from even recent history about how alternatives can work: Visicalc, Hypercard, Smalltalk, etc. Insofar as these conversations rely on discussing "programming languages" -- a loaded term, and only part of the picture really -- rather than whole "computing environments," then we tread further down a losing path for everyone.