[frankus]

I've been thinking a lot lately about what sorts of systems "the rest of us" (where by "us" I mean "them") are able to program effectively.

One thing I've noticed is that people that don't really know programming in a hacker sense seem to have no problem creating a spreadsheet that calculates even fairly complex things (not that FizzBuzz is complicated, but see here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnUa0E6R--UedGd...).

I think one of the biggest factors is that users don't have to keep track of the order of operations. If you change the value in cell A1, and cell B6 depends on it, and D5 depends on it, and so on until you get to Z22, there's no step-by-step thinking about what order the calculations will be done in. Basically a change in the input is instantaneously (and automatically, transparently) reflected in the output.

Another big factor is that all state is made explicit by default.

In some ways it seems similar to functional reactive programming. The code for e.g. FizzBuzz looks crazy complicated (http://www.lejordet.com/2012/01/fizzbuzz-with-reactive-exten...), but if you hooked it together in a GUI (sort of how Quartz Composer works on the Mac) it would probably be pretty easy to wrap your head around, and probably possible for someone with no formal programming knowledge to figure out, if not recreate.