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I'm of the age that I also consider 50 years ago to be the dawn of computing. Turns out it's closer to 75. :-) It has been said that non-programmers used to ca

I'm of the age that I also consider 50 years ago to be the dawn of computing. Turns out it's closer to 75. :-) It has been said that non-programmers used to catch on to APL quite quickly back in the day. Faster than regular programming languages in fact. The designers, Ken Iverson, didn't even design the language to be run on computers but rather as a mathematical notation. Someone else mentioned Excel, and that is an example of data-oriented programming. It actually hides the code and displays the data, which is why most programmers hate it. It's not the data that is important when doing development, but the code. Array oriented languages like APL and R allows you to work with data like Excel, but you work with the code, not the numbers. I'd argue that once you learn more about programming, one tends to want to work with the code rather than just looking at data.

j-pb 5y ago
> one tends to want to work with the code rather than just looking at data I've observed the opposite trend. The more senior people get the more they care about the data and less about the code. Programming = Datastructures + Algorithms But it's the Data-structures/-models that dictate the algorithms and it's the domain and data therein that dictates the model. Most companies could survive their code being lost. None would survive loosing all their customer data. Functional programming is all about data, react is about data, machine learning is about data, google and facebook are about data. Code is an incidental means to an end, in 90% of all cases, except flight software and games maybe, but even there the trend is towards data driven ECS-Systems and "collect all data for a timestep, and execute your flight control program to compute all actuator outputs in one go"-approaches. And observability is one of THE hot topics in the biz right now.
Someone 5y ago
> It has been said that non-programmers used to catch on to APL quite quickly back in the day Thompson and Ritchie also said their secretaries happily wrote troff. Do people get pampered too much today or are we severely underestimating them?
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  I think we underestimate them, but they also underestimate themselves (I hear a lot of "I can't..." by people who definitely can, once that word is in their head they no longer can but because of the mental block). Also, there was a major difference between what the secretaries would have been using before troff and their experience with troff. In particular, at that time, they were probably using typewriters. A digital workflow would have been a massive improvement in experience. Need multiple copies? No more carbon copies or retyping, now it just comes off the printer (which may still use a carbon copy, but at least you don't have to retype it). Need to adjust something? At least for future printouts it's just changing the file, and maybe using whiteout and handwriting the correction in a few printouts. Want to reflow the entire page? On a typewriter you start over, with troff you edit. Today, people have Word and Google Docs, why do they need troff/Markdown/TeX/LaTeX/Asciidoc/org-mode/etc.? The experience, for the user, is not as qualitatively different as those secretaries would have experienced at the time. Not just secretaries, my parents (a pilot and an engineer) took to computers in the 1970s (in college)/1980s (work, later home) for the same reason, it was a better experience than using typewriters and hand calculating things (even with a calculator).
  - TheMonarchist 5y ago
    > Today, people have Word and Google Docs, why do they need troff/Markdown/TeX/LaTeX/Asciidoc/org-mode/etc.? Because what they write has structure and they don't want to be distracted by the looks.
    - Jtsummers 5y ago
      Just saw your reply, but I think you're missing my point and I'm not sure if it's willful or not. If not, here it is again: The difference in experience between Word/Docs and the various text-based markup languages is not as significant as the difference that someone would have experienced going from a typewriter to something digital, whether troff or anything else. It is like trying to get someone to go from Excel -> another programming language, versus a handheld calculator and pen and paper to anything on a computer. There are differences, I'm not saying there aren't and you're being obtuse if that's how you're taking it, but the magnitude is far less. Regarding your "don't want to be distracted", Word has had an outline mode since at least 1995 (first time I used Word). Not sure about Google Docs, but it's a perfectly fine distraction free writing environment. So that's not even a selling point for users of Word.
ModernMech 5y ago
> It has been said that non-programmers used to catch on to APL quite quickly back in the day. This is still true today. I used to run a program for kids where they coded with robots. We used C for a while and we spent the whole time teaching C, never really getting to cool robot activities. Then we switched to Matlab, and it was like night and day. They took to Matlab so quickly, and I think you are right that the array nature of the language is the main reason. Others include the ubiquitous table datatype, and a REPL interface.
wodenokoto 5y ago
I’m mid 30s and still think 50 years ago is 1950 …

j-pb 5y ago

> one tends to want to work with the code rather than just looking at data I've observed the opposite trend. The more senior people get the more they care about the data and less about the code. Programming = Datastructures + Algorithms But it's the Data-structures/-models that dictate the algorithms and it's the domain and data therein that dictates the model. Most companies could survive their code being lost. None would survive loosing all their customer data. Functional programming is all about data, react is about data, machine learning is about data, google and facebook are about data. Code is an incidental means to an end, in 90% of all cases, except flight software and games maybe, but even there the trend is towards data driven ECS-Systems and "collect all data for a timestep, and execute your flight control program to compute all actuator outputs in one go"-approaches. And observability is one of THE hot topics in the biz right now.

Someone 5y ago

> It has been said that non-programmers used to catch on to APL quite quickly back in the day Thompson and Ritchie also said their secretaries happily wrote troff. Do people get pampered too much today or are we severely underestimating them?

Jtsummers 5y ago
I think we underestimate them, but they also underestimate themselves (I hear a lot of "I can't..." by people who definitely can, once that word is in their head they no longer can but because of the mental block). Also, there was a major difference between what the secretaries would have been using before troff and their experience with troff. In particular, at that time, they were probably using typewriters. A digital workflow would have been a massive improvement in experience. Need multiple copies? No more carbon copies or retyping, now it just comes off the printer (which may still use a carbon copy, but at least you don't have to retype it). Need to adjust something? At least for future printouts it's just changing the file, and maybe using whiteout and handwriting the correction in a few printouts. Want to reflow the entire page? On a typewriter you start over, with troff you edit. Today, people have Word and Google Docs, why do they need troff/Markdown/TeX/LaTeX/Asciidoc/org-mode/etc.? The experience, for the user, is not as qualitatively different as those secretaries would have experienced at the time. Not just secretaries, my parents (a pilot and an engineer) took to computers in the 1970s (in college)/1980s (work, later home) for the same reason, it was a better experience than using typewriters and hand calculating things (even with a calculator).
- TheMonarchist 5y ago
  > Today, people have Word and Google Docs, why do they need troff/Markdown/TeX/LaTeX/Asciidoc/org-mode/etc.? Because what they write has structure and they don't want to be distracted by the looks.
  - Jtsummers 5y ago
    Just saw your reply, but I think you're missing my point and I'm not sure if it's willful or not. If not, here it is again: The difference in experience between Word/Docs and the various text-based markup languages is not as significant as the difference that someone would have experienced going from a typewriter to something digital, whether troff or anything else. It is like trying to get someone to go from Excel -> another programming language, versus a handheld calculator and pen and paper to anything on a computer. There are differences, I'm not saying there aren't and you're being obtuse if that's how you're taking it, but the magnitude is far less. Regarding your "don't want to be distracted", Word has had an outline mode since at least 1995 (first time I used Word). Not sure about Google Docs, but it's a perfectly fine distraction free writing environment. So that's not even a selling point for users of Word.

ModernMech 5y ago

> It has been said that non-programmers used to catch on to APL quite quickly back in the day. This is still true today. I used to run a program for kids where they coded with robots. We used C for a while and we spent the whole time teaching C, never really getting to cool robot activities. Then we switched to Matlab, and it was like night and day. They took to Matlab so quickly, and I think you are right that the array nature of the language is the main reason. Others include the ubiquitous table datatype, and a REPL interface.

wodenokoto 5y ago

I’m mid 30s and still think 50 years ago is 1950 …