[loup-vaillant]

Oh yes it is. Users should be programmers. All of them. Just so they can write those little scripts. It's a question of independence.

You probably wanted to say that the future is not to dumb down programming to the level of my "mom". I agree with that.

[CodeMage]

Maybe I have a weird family, but my mom does not want to write any scripts. She just wants the damn thing to work.

For her and many other people I know, it's a bit like driving a car. If you want to drive a car, you have to know certain basic rules and that's it. The guys who do maintenance and repairs are the ones who know what happens under the hood and you take your car to them whenever necessary.

I also know lots of people who know what happens under the hood and love to tinker with their cars. I'm not one of them myself. I do that with computers, but not with cars. I don't see why computers should be a special case where everyone has to know how to tinker with the "stuff under the hood".

[loup-vaillant]

First, what we want an what's good for us are two different sets of things. Especially when you don't have total information.

Second, programming does not always mean tinkering stuff "under the hood". Advanced spreadsheets are front-end and programming at the same time. Even that:

  $ cat * | grep "groceries" | sort

is a program (though a rather trivial one). "Real" programs will still be professional and hobbyist stuff. But scripting can be everyone's business.

Third, computers are fundamentally different from any other device: they are general purpose. They can process any information you care to feed them, in any way you care to program them to.

Finally, when our moms want to do something the computer can't presently do, but could, they have 3 alternatives: give up, acquire a program that does the job, or program it themselves. For many many jobs, acquire a program is the only viable solution. But for small, specialized tasks, the existence of a dedicated program is less likely. So if our moms want the damn thing to "just work", they have no choice but to program it.

Knowing how to use computers (and the internet) is becoming as important as knowing how to read. Because computers are general purpose machines, knowing how to program them is an important part of knowing how to use them. It's a big investment, but so is reading.