[rhelmer]

As bad (and deserved) as their reputation is for helping well-meaning users to create a big mess, spreadsheet software provides an incredibly intuitive UI to put in front of users that have the domain knowledge but not necessarily direct software engineering knowledge.

I've been thinking about this for years, ever since I first read "A Small Matter of Programming" by Bonnie Nardi: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/small-matter-programming where she explored the history of end-user programming systems, and concludes that spreadsheet and CAD software are the only examples that have had widespread and undeniable success.

ASMOP was published in 1993 and I think it is still just as relevant today.

Just as it's possible to write a terribly-architected and designed program in any language, I suspect that with the right engineering effort and insight, modern software engineering practices could bring the complexity under control.

We shouldn't expect to just take spreadsheets and stick them into production, just as you wouldn't take a hastily-written prototype written in any programming language and do the same.

[scroot]

End user "programming" systems are precisely what personal computing was supposed to be about. Aside from spreadsheets and maybe a couple of other things (hangers-on from the business world), that line of inquiry and use has been abandoned. It's worth the development community's time to ask why today we have a larger schism between "programmers" and "users" than we did in the 90s.

Let's remember just how popular Hypercard was and what it meant for personal computing. It did not die because people weren't using it. It was allowed to wither on the vine because it never made business sense. And that's tragic.

[itsananderson]

My understanding of that shift is that the average "user" has become less savvy, because of improved UX and an overall increase in the percentage of the population who are "users". This is because over the last 30 years computers have moved out of just the business/academia/enthusiast space into people's homes (and then pockets).

The average "user" can't program a computer because we've been able to bring computing to a whole new population of people with neither the opportunity nor inclination to learn to use a computer at that level. You don't have to be a computer nerd to get immense value from computing, and in my mind that's a very good thing.

[scroot]

Excel is programming a computer. So was Hypercard. Any UX that reduces user "savvy" rather than enhacing it can hardly be said to be improved. A large part of the developer community has a very static idea of what a computer can be or what programming can be. What does it mean to author in the medium and why have we stopped trying to figure it out?

[regularfry]

I think it depends what you mean by "savvy". A UX which reduces what the user has to think about to get stuff done is generally positive. That's what an abstraction is, and we intentionally create them all the time.

The counter-example is trite, but it's true: it's a very good thing that I don't need to know how a Xeon is going to reorder the instructions that v8 is going to turn my webpage into after Babel has turned my es6+whateverextensions into something node can actually execute. I can go down the stack and find out if I absolutely have to, but it's a total waste of time otherwise.

I also don't think we've stopped trying to figure it out. We see new languages, new environments coming forward fairly regularly. My instinct is that the reason it seems that way is because the computing field selected for people interested in that stuff early, and more recent incomers are a) people who don't yet have the experience to understand where the limits are; and b) as a population are less interested on the whole in asking those questions, because if they had been interested, they'd already be present. It's also dramatically harder for a single project to become ubiquitous the way Hypercard was, simply because of the size of both computer-using and software project populations. It's a statistical artefact, in other words.

[regularfry]

There's an optimistic take on this which says that in the beginning, the only people who were close enough to computing to understand what was possible were programmers and engineers, so the ideas that had currency revolved around programming and engineering. As the reach of computing has grown, the range of people who can have good ideas of what to do with a computer has grown to include half of humanity (give or take), so the ideas of what's worth doing are taken from a much bigger pool.

The trade-off is that projects which can make an impact across the entire ecosystem (like Hypercard did) must reach a much wider variety of minds, and that's incredibly hard today. However, I can almost guarantee that there are tools out there that have similar impacts to Hypercard within specific niches, with higher user stats than Hypercard ever had. You don't hear about them because the size of the pool has grown so much.

[zbentley]

> why today we have a larger schism between "programmers" and "users" than we did in the 90s.

Because we do more with computers (adding complexity to programming as a task) and the amount of money and people involved have both increased (making that complexity hard or impossible to reduce).

[scroot]

Complexity can't be the only answer (and there is evidence it can be tamed anyway). Over the past two decades developer culture and wider technological culture has conditioned regular people to be passive consumers of computing, rather than authors of it.

The fact that there are no compelling RADs for the major platforms -- especially ones that use intuitive metaphors -- speaks volumes. I have worked on many small freelance projects for the past few years and the issues most users have are all more or less the same: they need to organize some information in a way that is useful to them and to interact with it somehow. This might involve more remote fetching than it did in the 90s, but this isn't that much more complicated.

Imagining another way has become completely unfashionable, mostly because of marketing and the stated needs of business. We no longer apply the hands-off funding and timespans for the kinds of computing research that gave us personal computers in the first place.

Things are not the way they are because of some natural law.