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by jimbokun
2348 days ago
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I don't think your career is any danger from better tools. (At least short of full-AI, which would put every career in danger.) All kinds of amazing visual interface building tools have been created, that are very easy to use, easy to teach, easy to get started, and are very powerful. I'm still not sure that a better UI development tool than Hypercard has been invented yet. So why do professional programmers still exist? Because most people don't want to do even that level of software development. Either they find it beneath them, find it boring, get frustrated when they want to do something that stretches the tool's capabilities, don't want to be responsible for fixing bugs and maintenance, etc. etc. etc. It's not that most professionals are not smart enough to be programmers. It's that they dislike it enough to pay someone else to do it for them, or would just rather focus their time doing other things they enjoy more or believe to provide more value. |
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I'm not so sure about this. Hypercard was extremely popular among non-programmers in its heyday. It is not their fault that Apple, who had no idea what to really do with the software, let it die on the vine.
Computer companies have inclucated a computing culture that places a sharp perceptual divide between users and programmers, leaving little room for anything in between. My belief is that this has happened for wider structural/economic reasons (contemporary emphasis on consumerism, short term thinking, etc) rather than any general distaste for "real computing" among regular people.
If we do not provide regular people with "Hypercard-like things" and instead give them shrinkwrapped solutions, we will of course have the perception that they have no interest in what we call -- for lack of a better term -- end user programming.