[skybrian]

Part of it is that Free Software dates back to a time when most users were also programmers.

If you look beyond licensing issues, Unix scripting, Emacs, Smalltalk, BASIC interpreters, and HyperCard were other early attempts at helping users become programmers, though spreadsheets turned out to be far more successful.

But if you want to help everybody, even the most nontechnical, even spreadsheets are sort of beside the point and not really what they want. Instead, making things easier to use (as Apple does) is closer to the mark.

[scroot]

> But if you want to help everybody, even the most nontechnical, even spreadsheets are sort of beside the point and not really what they want. Instead, making things easier to use (as Apple does) is closer to the mark.

A counter to this is that in the process of "making things easier to use," companies like Apple have in fact taken the "computing" out of the medium. Today Apple provides tools that allow very snappy and intuitive imitations of things that already existed: music, movies, etc., along with some basic tools to organize these things.

Spreadsheets and Hypercard are examples of media that are unique to computing -- they allow users to do things they literally cannot without having a computing device. This is not true for many of the things consumers use personal computers for today: as a phone, as a messaging system, as a radio, etc, etc. Computing today is almost myopically focused on making more convenient and efficient copies of things that already exist.

It might be true that Hypercard and spreadsheets are "not really what people want." But what if tools like those are exactly what people need?

I have come across innumerable situations where regular office people need to go just one step further than their shrinkwrapped desktop applications allow them to. At that point they have two options: either find some software that also does the very specific thing you need to do, or learn an entire general programming language and all the low level (and immediately irrelevant) information that goes with it. There is no longer anything viable in between those two extremes. As technologists we have really failed these people.

[skybrian]

Yes, this seems more likely to happen in a business setting, or maybe in support of a nonprofit or community organization. But I don't see retirees (for example) having much of a need for end-user programming. Even as a semi-retired computer programmer, I see little practical reason for programming. Pre-existing software does pretty much everything I want to do. So it's a hobby at best. Or maybe art.

It seems like "imitations of things that already existed" is a flexible category that includes practically everything if you squint hard enough? Spreadsheets existed before computers. People did calculations by hand. You can do a lot of business things on paper.

"Things that already existed" also tend to be serving universal human needs that already existed. If you really needed it done and had the money, you could hire a human to do it. If the history of some human desire or need starts after computers, it's probably not all that essential, or maybe was caused by computers (like anti-virus software).