[908B64B197]

> And yet there's a chasm of capability between programmers and users, and it's actually true that what programmers do isn't something most "normal people" will ever be capable of. But is that because programmers have some wildly special form of intelligence that most people don't have, or is it because our tools suck?

Every time I used a "No-Code" solution it got me 95% where I wanted to be. The remaining 5% took twice as long as the first 95% because now I had to "go behind the scenes" and figure out the custom API exposed by whatever tool I was using. And then figure out a workaround that would inevitably break with the next version of the tool.

And even with the No-Code, it's still being able to decompose a problem into smaller sub-problems, find the similarities and make sure they are well defined. I think there are a lot more folks with these abilities but you'll find them in math and engineering departments mostly.

[erichanson]

Agree about no-code. But UI that generates code is a pretty cool paradigm. For most common patterns, end users don't need to know that there's a bunch of boilerplate code under the hood, but if that isn't sufficient, that remaining 5% can be reached by just jumping into some auto-generated code that's readable and well-commented. Mere mortals can do the 95% themselves and then call in a wizard for the hard parts, or try to figure it out on their own. Plus, any non-generated solutions can be highlighted, so it builds up a record of the places where the UI fell short.

[908B64B197]

Interface builders sort of work like that (creates the boilerplate for UI elements and formatting).

But again, NeXT interface builder predates 1996.