> ...they focus on ease of learning as the be-all and end-all of usability. I see people jump to this conclusion on pretty much every post of this type. In thi

> ...they focus on ease of learning as the be-all and end-all of usability. I see people jump to this conclusion on pretty much every post of this type. In this case it is clear from the authors work (http://www.subtext-lang.org/ http://www.subtext-lang.org/) that his focus is not on making programming familiar/easy to non-technical users but rather on having the computer help manage cognitively expensive tasks such as navigating nested conditionals or keeping various representations of the same state in sync. > ...you learn something once, but you use it continuously. Empirically speaking, the vast majority of people do not learn to program at all. In our research we have interviewed a number of people in highly skilled jobs who would benefit hugely from basic automation skills but can't spare the years of training necessary to get there with current tools. There does come a point where the finiteness of human life has to come into the simple vs easy tradeoff. You also assume that the tradeoff is currently tight. I believe, based on the research I've posted elsewhere in this discussion and on the months of reading we've done for our work, that there is still plenty of space to make things both simpler and easier. I've talked about this before - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7760790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7760790