[andrewjl]

> The people that want to program will do so no matter what the end-user environment is. Most people just don't want to.

As an example, take Excel and Python scripting. Almost anyone who uses the former can pick up the latter yet that isn't what typically happens. There is effectively a chasm between the two. Why is that?

[bombcar]

Almost everyone who uses python would say they're programming (or 'scripting') - but very few people who do very similar things in Excel would say the same.

Excel is like Factorio or Minecraft, you end up "automating" things you were doing by hand and it doesn't "feel" programatic, and you can very easily "peek and poke" the memory of the "program" as you go along.

Hypercard (and maybe Flash, I never used either) might be somewhere in-between, but closer to Excel.

Powerpoint is almost programmable, but nobody uses it that way.

(There's a similar disjuncture amongst the Linux/Mac users where they will write bash/zsh scripts but not count it as programming.)

[andrewjl]

> you end up "automating" things you were doing by hand and it doesn't "feel" programatic, and you can very easily "peek and poke" the memory of the "program" as you go along.

I don't see how that's different from mucking around with Python locally on your own machine?