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I made a long list of some of the difficulties one encounters in trying to use industrial-grade tools to solve home-repair-grade problems: http://www.lighttable

by jamii 12y ago

I made a long list of some of the difficulties one encounters in trying to use industrial-grade tools to solve home-repair-grade problems: http://www.lighttable.com/2014/05/16/pain-we-forgot/ http://www.lighttable.com/2014/05/16/pain-we-forgot/ It's not just programming that is hard, it's editing, debugging, compiling, version control, packaging, deploying, upgrading etc. Existing tools give you a huge amount of flexibility and power (that most end-user tasks don't need) at the expense of a brutal learning curve. They make complex things possible but easy things tiresome. Consider how long it takes for the average CS undergrad to reach a point where they could build, deploy and maintain the simple webapp I described in that post. There is definitely room for a simplified set of tools that lets end-users build simple applications with a pay-as-you-go approach to complexity and learning curve.

SomeCallMeTim 12y ago
>There is definitely room for a simplified set of tools that lets end-users build simple applications with a pay-as-you-go approach to complexity and learning curve. You want this to succeed, then pick a domain and solve that problem for people. It's not the source control that is the primary problem. You can do Excel-like things on Google Drive, which has integrated revision control, shared editing, and a dozen other features to help the average user or team get things done. No, the primary problem is that most people don't know what they want. They don't even know what's possible, much less how to accomplish it. Ask any consultant and they'll agree with me: The first thing you need to do is figure out what the users actually can use based on their needs. It's like Henry Ford said: If you asked users what they wanted, they'd have told him they wanted a faster horse. [1] The problems exist because they aren't easy to solve unless you have the expertise. I'm not poo-pooing Excel or any other domain-specific solution. If you can create a general solution to a problem (say, for example, WordPress), then users can plug together the pieces they need and create an app. But there is no "language" that will solve the "average person can't program" problem in the general case any more than there's a paintbrush that will solve the "average person can't paint" problem. [1] http://blog.cauvin.org/2010/07/henry-fords-faster-horse-quote.html http://blog.cauvin.org/2010/07/henry-fords-faster-horse-quot...

by jamii 12y ago

SomeCallMeTim 12y ago

>There is definitely room for a simplified set of tools that lets end-users build simple applications with a pay-as-you-go approach to complexity and learning curve. You want this to succeed, then pick a domain and solve that problem for people. It's not the source control that is the primary problem. You can do Excel-like things on Google Drive, which has integrated revision control, shared editing, and a dozen other features to help the average user or team get things done. No, the primary problem is that most people don't know what they want. They don't even know what's possible, much less how to accomplish it. Ask any consultant and they'll agree with me: The first thing you need to do is figure out what the users actually can use based on their needs. It's like Henry Ford said: If you asked users what they wanted, they'd have told him they wanted a faster horse. [1] The problems exist because they aren't easy to solve unless you have the expertise. I'm not poo-pooing Excel or any other domain-specific solution. If you can create a general solution to a problem (say, for example, WordPress), then users can plug together the pieces they need and create an app. But there is no "language" that will solve the "average person can't program" problem in the general case any more than there's a paintbrush that will solve the "average person can't paint" problem. [1] http://blog.cauvin.org/2010/07/henry-fords-faster-horse-quote.html http://blog.cauvin.org/2010/07/henry-fords-faster-horse-quot...