It seems like the period when this idea hit its peak was in the late 1980s and early 1990s. That's when there were a lot of apps built to maximize what non-prog

It seems like the period when this idea hit its peak was in the late 1980s and early 1990s. That's when there were a lot of apps built to maximize what non-programmers could do, and which also offered the easiest possible on-ramp for people who did want to write simple scripts. Among the big successes of that time: Hypercard Macromedia Director, which later evolved into Flash VisualBasic, which had fantastic WYSIWYG tools for interfaces A little later: Dreamweaver PageMill All the early Web tools (there were hundreds) It is difficult to now remember the cult that existed around Hypercard for awhile, and which lead to spin off products, like SuperCard. There was a real mania at that time to make it easy for everyone to learn the basics of programming. At some point after 2000, and especially after 2010, the idea seemed to fade, and the tech industry for awhile got caught up in going in a very different direction: big frameworks, increasingly complex, increasingly abstract, a development system that required more and more tools. I would like to see some of the old "education for the masses" energy come back.