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Unpopular opinion inbound: what will spark a barefoot developer revolution is not LLM auto-coding, its making spreadsheet software more easily extendable and FU

Unpopular opinion inbound: what will spark a barefoot developer revolution is not LLM auto-coding, its making spreadsheet software more easily extendable and FUN. By extendable, I mean doing things like generating and sending emails, and using plugins to integrate with external services. By fun, I mean non-enterprisey, something that one would WANT to engage in as a hobby and that a total novice can pick up and gradually learn. Something you can engage in with friends. I know that there are things that meet the extendable part of the equation, its the fun hobby part that I don't think has been cracked yet. I think a big part of why I became a coder is because I enjoyed playing with Microsoft Access as a kid - but I'm a weird nerd, so I don't think that'll cut it for others.

dan-allen 2y ago
Oh that’s interesting and I think you’re right. Software as it’s developed today is very abstract but spreadsheets have a visual representation that makes them much more approachable.
- throwanem 2y ago
  An immediate visual representation, at that. HMR at best offers a pale shadow of the feedback loop Excel users get for free.
kragen 2y ago
what software would you nominate as central examples of fun? do you think there are people who want their fun to be easy fun instead of hard fun?
- flir 2y ago
  Just throwing it out there, but from what I've seen of it Airtable compares favourably with Excel for the "ad hoc database" use case.
  - kragen 2y ago
    ideally, things as different as possible from excel!
  - liampulles 2y ago
    I use Airtable at work actually, its quite a nice tool for hacking internal tools together. Its extension requires Javascript though, which while great for professional coders like me, IMO I don't think it would extend to a more general population as being interesting.
skydhash 2y ago
Currently trying emacs (after years of VIM) and what amazes me is how easy it is to extend the system. I don't know if we can extends this to novice. But spreadsheet and form builder looks like the most viable candidate. Maybe extends it with modules like data providers (files, music, contacts, emails,...) and actions (open file, play audio, call, send email,...). But this require open standards and protocols and the industry is trying hard to move away from those.
Bjorkbat 2y ago
I largely agree with you. Spreadsheets are arguably the most successful no-code/low-code tool out there in that they've enabled millions of people to automate some task or complex process and effectively become programmers, despite the fact that I personally find an empty spreadsheet to be kind of intimidating to look at. I think the only point of disagreement we might have is that I don't necessarily think that the speadsheet, even an improved one, is the best graphical model/structure for articulating complex processes, but it seems to be the best we've discovered thus far.
- shagie 2y ago
  A spreadsheet is lisp under the covers. Be it =IF(test, then, else) or (if test then else) - that's just syntax of a functional language dialect.
- liampulles 2y ago
  "I don't necessarily think that the speadsheet, even an improved one, is the best graphical model/structure for articulating complex processes, but it seems to be the best we've discovered thus far." I actually do agree with you on that, as you say its just the best we've discovered so far. But if there is a better model which is as versatile and easy to use, I'm totally open to it.
  - jdougan 2y ago
    I think Lotus Improv was on to something.
zem 2y ago
couldn't agree more - i love the whole idea of barefoot developers, the analogy with china's barefoot doctors was superb, but all the time i was thinking what we need is visual basic and access and hypercard revamped for the internet era, not LLM-generated code.
purple-leafy 2y ago
I love this take. Spreadsheets are one of the coolest low-code things ever that even normies can have fun with. At my first job out of uni, a telco had a 25+ sheets spreadsheet each with 1000s of rows and accompanied by some normie VBA scripts , to basically power optical network allocations … I was amazed and terrified when I first saw it. Absolutely no source control. Speaking of spreadsheets, is there a spreadsheet with built in source control?
tech2 2y ago
Historically a number of people started as single small developers with tools like FoxPro, Delphi, and (even earlier) Clipper/dBase. These allowed easy creation of some kind of UI. All of these have a database under the hood. The combination of the two allowed a lot of small groups to make quite complicated systems for a single platform. Now there's an expectation for things to be web-based and the entry point feels less obvious than it used to be.
maccard 2y ago
The barrier to entry for programming couldn’t really be much lower. Pretty much everyone with a computer can write and run JavaScript in their browser, and there are even web based environments and editors like GitHub code spaces. Google docs has a pretty neat JavaScript api that can be used from inside the apps themselves too.
flutas 2y ago
> what will spark a barefoot developer revolution is not LLM auto-coding, its making spreadsheet software more easily extendable and FUN. I've actually seen it happen using exactly that. A (non-tech) person trying to write an inventory management software for their company (which is highly regulated and inspected) using Google AppSheets. No amount of "don't" was enough to convince them... 6 months and much of their sanity later they gave up.
- dagw 2y ago
  I've seen it happen too. No amount of "don't" was enough to convince them...6 month later they had a weird hacky solution that solved their problem and was used across the company and on the whole seemed to do what the relevant people needed it to do.

dan-allen 2y ago

Oh that’s interesting and I think you’re right. Software as it’s developed today is very abstract but spreadsheets have a visual representation that makes them much more approachable.

throwanem 2y ago
An immediate visual representation, at that. HMR at best offers a pale shadow of the feedback loop Excel users get for free.

kragen 2y ago

what software would you nominate as central examples of fun? do you think there are people who want their fun to be easy fun instead of hard fun?

flir 2y ago
Just throwing it out there, but from what I've seen of it Airtable compares favourably with Excel for the "ad hoc database" use case.
- kragen 2y ago
  ideally, things as different as possible from excel!
- liampulles 2y ago
  I use Airtable at work actually, its quite a nice tool for hacking internal tools together. Its extension requires Javascript though, which while great for professional coders like me, IMO I don't think it would extend to a more general population as being interesting.

skydhash 2y ago

Currently trying emacs (after years of VIM) and what amazes me is how easy it is to extend the system. I don't know if we can extends this to novice. But spreadsheet and form builder looks like the most viable candidate. Maybe extends it with modules like data providers (files, music, contacts, emails,...) and actions (open file, play audio, call, send email,...). But this require open standards and protocols and the industry is trying hard to move away from those.

Bjorkbat 2y ago

I largely agree with you. Spreadsheets are arguably the most successful no-code/low-code tool out there in that they've enabled millions of people to automate some task or complex process and effectively become programmers, despite the fact that I personally find an empty spreadsheet to be kind of intimidating to look at. I think the only point of disagreement we might have is that I don't necessarily think that the speadsheet, even an improved one, is the best graphical model/structure for articulating complex processes, but it seems to be the best we've discovered thus far.

shagie 2y ago
A spreadsheet is lisp under the covers. Be it =IF(test, then, else) or (if test then else) - that's just syntax of a functional language dialect.
liampulles 2y ago
"I don't necessarily think that the speadsheet, even an improved one, is the best graphical model/structure for articulating complex processes, but it seems to be the best we've discovered thus far." I actually do agree with you on that, as you say its just the best we've discovered so far. But if there is a better model which is as versatile and easy to use, I'm totally open to it.
- jdougan 2y ago
  I think Lotus Improv was on to something.

zem 2y ago

couldn't agree more - i love the whole idea of barefoot developers, the analogy with china's barefoot doctors was superb, but all the time i was thinking what we need is visual basic and access and hypercard revamped for the internet era, not LLM-generated code.

purple-leafy 2y ago

I love this take. Spreadsheets are one of the coolest low-code things ever that even normies can have fun with. At my first job out of uni, a telco had a 25+ sheets spreadsheet each with 1000s of rows and accompanied by some normie VBA scripts , to basically power optical network allocations … I was amazed and terrified when I first saw it. Absolutely no source control. Speaking of spreadsheets, is there a spreadsheet with built in source control?

tech2 2y ago

Historically a number of people started as single small developers with tools like FoxPro, Delphi, and (even earlier) Clipper/dBase. These allowed easy creation of some kind of UI. All of these have a database under the hood. The combination of the two allowed a lot of small groups to make quite complicated systems for a single platform. Now there's an expectation for things to be web-based and the entry point feels less obvious than it used to be.

maccard 2y ago

The barrier to entry for programming couldn’t really be much lower. Pretty much everyone with a computer can write and run JavaScript in their browser, and there are even web based environments and editors like GitHub code spaces. Google docs has a pretty neat JavaScript api that can be used from inside the apps themselves too.

flutas 2y ago

> what will spark a barefoot developer revolution is not LLM auto-coding, its making spreadsheet software more easily extendable and FUN. I've actually seen it happen using exactly that. A (non-tech) person trying to write an inventory management software for their company (which is highly regulated and inspected) using Google AppSheets. No amount of "don't" was enough to convince them... 6 months and much of their sanity later they gave up.

dagw 2y ago
I've seen it happen too. No amount of "don't" was enough to convince them...6 month later they had a weird hacky solution that solved their problem and was used across the company and on the whole seemed to do what the relevant people needed it to do.