3 ms·
Casual programming
- eternityforest 3y agoI'm surprised this stuff just stalled out with Excel. Everyone since then has been trying to use BASH, and assuming that everyone has text files of local data they need to process. A lot of these super easy coding for everyone languages still focus mostly on processing text data, which I almost never need to do, rather than interacting with APIs, stateful logic, sending notifications, etc. It would be nice to have an embeddable scripting language that was completely visual. I've done things like this myself for limited applications, but a real general purpose way to add IFTT functionality would be nice. One thing I haven't seen yet is languages that work both locally and in the cloud. Like, what if I want all documents in a folder to have some boilerplate. I could add a rule that makes the change, but what if I'm offline? I'd want it to run locally too, and when I finally do sync I'd want it to know that I already ran that rule locally and it doesn't need to happen on the server if the trigger isn't new. Another thing is that to really be maximally awesome, the language would need to specify how different applications could interact. So many things people wish they could automate involve two different GUI programs. I might want to add "When global shortcut Ctrl-G is used, fill the active cell with the result of the GetKitchenScaleValue function from this other program". The model I usually work with is you have a list of event handlers, each one has a trigger and a list of action blocks, the action block parameters can have =expressions, some blocks can stop that row if a condition isn't met. I find that covers most of what I want to do with casual programming with almost no learning curve.