[dragonwriter]

> What reason is there to believe we can improve programming technology to be vastly easier and more accessible? To start with, spreadsheets.

So many failed efforts to make programming vastly easier and more accessible have started with almost this exact line.

I think it's possible that there is a seductive trap there. We see spreadsheets and we think, “programming that doesn't have the downsides we associate with spreadsheets could be just as accessible”. But maybe the problems are intimately tied to what makes it accessible, and wheb you try to make programming that accessible you either fail or end up with something that doesn't offer any advantage over the spreadsheets we have.

> Unfortunately application programming got trampled in the internet gold rush.

No, it didn't. Oh, sure, it's not getting chased around by venture capital, but there's plenty of it going on.

> As a result the internet age has seen an exponential increase in the complexity of programming, as well as its exclusivity.

It really hasn't; we may often be solving far more complex problems, but we do it with languages, frameworks, and platforms that allow casual programmers to do so more easily than at any time in the past. Programming is “more exclusive” only in that:

(1) in working environments, IT policies restrict programming (other than spreadsheets) to the high priesthood more completely than ever before, and

(2) lots of simple problems that would be solved by casual programming in the past now have end-user tools that allow them to be solved without anything we recognize as programming.

[david927]

> Unfortunately application programming got trampled in the internet gold rush.

No, it didn't

I think if you don't rely on memory but examine the history as Jonathan Edwards has done, you would be surprised to find that the late 1990's was, indeed, a big cliff in terms of application development innovation. You can argue the reasons -- maybe it's not about the internet gold rush -- but you would have to do a small fraction of his research to start to convince me.

> As a result the internet age has seen an exponential increase in the complexity of programming, as well as its exclusivity.

It really hasn't

Frankly, I'm not sure you know what you're talking about. Before the web was popularized, designing a layout meant a using a simple layout tool. Now it's a stack that is at least HTML, CSS and JS, and often more. We're doing more, to be sure, but you can't honestly claim, without a deep ignorance of the past, that it's easier or more inclusive.

[munchbunny]

> Frankly, I'm not sure you know what you're talking about. Before the web was popularized, designing a layout meant a using a simple layout tool. Now it's a stack that is at least HTML, CSS and JS, and often more. We're doing more, to be sure, but you can't honestly claim, without a deep ignorance of the past, that it's easier or more inclusive.

Since we're on the topic of UI, I think this is actually a great place to discuss what has happened to programming.

You used to be able to use a simple layout tool. But we traded that away for a substantially increased level of visual sophistication that wasn't practical with the predecessor technologies. For visual sophistication, you had a couple other quite complex options: render it yourself, or for about 15 years, use Flash.

However, we've also smoothed out the learning curve a lot. Even if you have to learn the HTML/CSS/JS triad, we've figured out how to teach it more incrementally.

Even UI in 3d games has gotten dramatically easier. These days you can hack something together in Unity with barely any coding knowledge. When I first started learning 3-d programming 10 years ago, your options were basically to learn C++.

Maybe it's not a 100% obvious conclusion, but I think on the balance of things it really has gotten easier and more inclusive.

[dragonwriter]

> I think if you don't rely on memory but examine the history as Jonathan Edwards has done, you would be surprised to find that the late 1990's was, indeed, a big cliff in terms of application development innovation.

The phase change was later, and it wasn't so much a cliff in innovation but a change in focus. There are plenty of programmers “using languages and tools designed for simplicity of learning and use in solving relatively pedestrian problems” still, and plenty of things being built to support them—they're the people doing CRUD apps in Ruby/Rails or building utilities for simple problems in Python that, as Edwards described being historically the case, the people doing “systems programming” continuously look down on.

(There's also a bigger huge group of people doing what is more like what was actually described as application programming historically, that is, solving relatively pedestrian problems in languages designed for industrial use rather than ease of learning, like the people building the guts of enterprise applications that don't require scale, and are largely CRUD plus business rules, using C# now, or the people doing LOB apps in any of a variety of [often proprietary] languages historically.)

> Before the web was popularized, designing a layout meant a using a simple layout tool.

One might argue that the complexity of design and the complexity of programming are different things, or one might observe that graphical UI builders exist for the Web (including as part of platforms designed specifically to support “application programming" for the Web), and that people doing the less sexy kinds of programming use them all the time.

[BjoernKW]

HTML in my opinion indeed is both much more accessible and more inclusive than many technologies that preceded it, particularly layout tools.

QuarkXPress, LaTex, visual GUI builders. These are different layout tools for very different purposes but they all have in common that they’re not as accessible (with Delphi / RAD Studio in the GUI builder category as the only exception that comes to mind) as “View source” or a simple text editor.

Granted, setting up a new web app with a modern framework such as Angular or React is way more complex than that. However, you also have tools like WordPress that allow you to publish content in a decent layout with little to no experience at all.

[orwin]

_Frankly, I'm not sure you know what you're talking about. Before the web was popularized, designing a layout meant a using a simple layout tool. Now it's a stack that is at least HTML, CSS and JS, and often more. We're doing more, to be sure, but you can't honestly claim, without a deep ignorance of the past, that it's easier or more inclusive._

Maybe developing web application is harder now (and i may disagree, react and node are really an improvement compared to 2013 SenchaJS imho). Also, CMS now exist for minimal programming.

But you're looking application-wise, not tooling-wise:

- Javascript is safer and easier to use with the last ES iteration (ore maybe it's just me, but my last pet project was really easy to complete with the new javascript).

- OpenBLAS now exist, and libraries were written around this fantastic piece of software. Compare a jupyter notebook to matlab, and appreciate how easy it is to do math on a computer now (and i had to use matlab in college for my math bachelor degree, so i KNOW it is less complex for young mathematicians right now)

- I've wrote stuff in C89 (gcc option, for school related work). Then i was allowed so use C99 (still for school). C99 was easier to write and to optimize. Also, my current collegues were using C in the early 90s, and for them debugging was a pain, while to me, C is one of the easiest language to debug thank to gdb (using the TUI or not).

- Sytem building automatisation is easier (not painless yet, but easier). You can argue it's more complex, but automated stuff i always more complex than manual (but faster too). And in the 90s, system automation was Perl job. I like Perl, but let's agree ansible is less complex.

- System monitoring is easier now too.

And i'm a relatively young programmer, with 2 languages i'm comfortable using for professional work (3 with bash, 4 with ansible, if it count). I'm pretty sure experienced programmers who can use other stuff than C and python have plenty of other experiences. Also, consider compiling your own kernel, writing your own filesystem and/or paquet manager. Would you rather do it in 2018 or in the early 00's? It is a second year project in my school. Second year. It use to be a master degree assessment in college.

Tools are easier to use, and information easier to get.