[jes5199]

it’s not just that our tools are poorly suited for non-programmers, they’re barely even suitable for experts! Today I lost 8 hours trying to get XCode to build our app after a library update. Last week I lost 8 hours wrestling with a build server, 8 more hours trying to test changes to some untestable legacy code, and another 8 hours just trying to get our code to do the things it looked like it was obviously written to do. I’m on a team of 4, and if it’s going like that for all of us, simple features like “send an email when <event>“ happens end up costing thousands of dollars to develop. No wonder our industry is skewed to only solving low-complexity problems in domains that move lots of money!

I have, recreationally, written code to simulate a rocket ship. It was a pretty significantly different experience than my day job. My usual tools didn’t help much, but you don’t actually need a lot of data modeling or fancy UI to draw a trajectory. Debugging was awful, though.

Maybe it’s a good time to re-read Brett Victor’s “Inventing on Principle” and ask ourselves what we can do to get closer to that vision