| > What the world needs is an operating system (or systems) or even an application or set of applications that almost everyone would want to use that require programming in some form or fashion to accomplish everyday tasks better. Tangentially related, but this is why I think Emacs is a great... should I say, 'platform'. Maybe not for young children as in the case you talked about with yours, but a quote from one of RMS's talks about Emacs [1] I think shows what I mean: > The editor itself was written entirely in Lisp. Multics Emacs proved to be a great success — programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program. Maybe it was the syntax of lisp (by which I mean the use parentheses/'S-expressions' vs. using other 'strange code-like' symbols such as curly braces or semicolons) was a part of why they didn't realise they were actually programming? Of course, this will not work today because editing/writing text in anything other than a WYSIWYG word processor interface is too unfamiliar to the average general purpose computer user, and therefore Emacs would too easily 'scare' off most users. But your comment reminded me of this and I thought it would be interesting to mention. [1]: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html |
You can see the same thing today with stuff like VBA macros in Excel. I've seen some amazingly complex business logic implemented that way by people who absolutely did not think of themselves as programmers, and indeed tended to respond with bafflement to the suggestion that what they'd done could be described as programming.