[quicklyfrozen]

We started down a road with more home cooking through things like Visual Basic. I remember seeing lots of useful things built by non-professionals during the era of VB 6, but it seems like nothing in the web era has filled that void.

[rvense]

I really wish there wasn't this big distinction between using a computer and programming a computer.

[qayxc]

It's all fun and games until you expose an SQL interface to your mainframe database in Excel so that the guys and gals in accounting, purchase, and marketing finally stop pestering you with change requests to their reports, just to find out that some extra-curious and clever gal in purchase managed to bring down the entire mainframe by constructing a SQL statement using a bunch of nested outer joins...

And while the blinkenlights in the server room start to morse at you through the window in the door in a menacing pattern, the guys and gals in server ops demand answers as they point at the avalanche of warning- and error messages that started lighting up the terminals like a Jedi knight fighting a swarm of mosquitoes in the swamps of Dagobar at midnight with his light sabre.

At this moment you can only begin to fathom what happens in operations at this moment, with orders being delayed, fulfilment rates dropping by the minute, pickers and lorry drivers starting to get pissed off at the nerd in IT who must have screwed up again and they know where your car is parked.

I guess what I really wanted to say is: be careful what you wish for, it might bite you in the end :)

[rvense]

Mainframe? Where we're going, we don't need mainframes.

[quicklyfrozen]

I've seen the exact same scenario play out with an e-commerce site using MySQL.

[akkartik]

Yes. <3

The old hobbyist computers would put you in front of a prompt when they booted up.

I'm working on something like this, actually. Here are some 2-minute videos:

https://archive.org/details/@kartik_agaram

[meredydd]

I have to jump in and plug Anvil (https://anvil.works) here - it's a Python web app builder very explicitly modelled on VB6 and other RAD systems.

Drag'n'drop UI, Python in the browser and the server, one-click deployment - we're aiming for exactly that niche!

[Jtsummers]

Python, though predominantly by technical non-programmer professionals. And it doesn't have quite the same RAD aspect with making GUIs that VB6 offered. I saw a lot of non-technical professionals using VB6 to make quick applications to solve their problem. The code would make you cry, but it worked.

And it wasn't web-based nonsense that's hosted on someone else's server for a monthly cost. They actually owned the results. That's a big difference versus what companies would offer today.

TCL/TK was great for making quick GUIs, but I never saw non-technical people use it for that purpose. Still seemed to be non-programmer, but still technical, professionals.

[akkartik]

Many languages seem to give the impression of being home-cooked early on. Ever do factories start small. But it's inevitably a mirage. If we want something that won't grow into something "industrial strength" that needs pip and virtualenv and God knows what else, we have to consciously make some scale-hostile design choices.

I've been poking at this problem: https://github.com/akkartik/mu