[prologic]

Functional programming paradigms? Matching? Complex syntax? Sorry but either I've missed the point, or you've lost me. If we're trying to create tools for non-Developers to build software, this isn't it. You can pretty much already just ask Claude/Codex/whatever and it'll build you a thing™ and it'll probably work. You don't even need to read the code.

[sodapopcan]

I have to admit, it's kinda nice to read a comment that's simply complaining about programming language design again. For a second I thought there wasn't even going to be mention of AI, but alas...

[nine_k]

Millions of people learn and practice functional reactive programming every day, without considering themselves software developers.

They just use spreadsheets.

Many of the lofty sounding concepts of programming were invented to make things simpler. Show them from a right aspect, and they are quite approachable to a non-engineer.

[pasquinelli]

from the article

> My hypothesis

> Developers deal with two broad categories of work.

> - Describing the logic of the problem they are solving using language constructs like if, loop, var etc. > - Working with computers to run those problems using constucts like $PATH, /var/tmp and AWS.

> There are a lot of humans who can do the first work fine but don’t have the time to master the second category. I call these humans “makers”.

the idea seems to be to make an end-user programming language for makers. makers want to make not ask ai to make, and they are capable of writing code, actually, it's just all the computer plumbing that's too much of a pain.

a sophisticated programming language to write personal software that cuts out the computer plumbing would be something i'd love. i'm not fully clear how that would be done, but i like the thought.

[tolciho]

AppleScript "English" was designed to be intuitive and easy to understand (or so claimed various manuals), but boy howdy did I spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what "English" it did accept.

[pjmlp]

Nowadays it would be coupled with a LLM and be much flexible in what it could accept as English sentences.

[mamcx]

The Op identify well the problem and the idea of the solution but the implementation is typically dev oriented.

A good example of the actual tool is FoxPro and similar (even better than MS Access based on the ideals of the article) and I observed being actually used by occasional "developers" that need more than Access/Vb/Excel.

I'm on the hunt for it with https://tablam.org but the main major pain point is to bring the actual UI. You can go anywhere with syntax and such, is how you connect to the rest where the magic must prove is real.

[saghm]

Didn't we invent the word "devops" specifically for the combination of work of development and ops? How did we get to the point where we now need a word for "development without the ops"?

[klez]

That's still not what this is about. Take the example in the article: people who don't write code 100% of the time but have to think about mechanical and electrical engineering consideration for most of the time. You don't describe that as DevOps.

[saghm]

Sure, but that doesn't seem anywhere in the realm of "I need to know what's on my $PATH or how to set up a security group in AWS"

[petra]

// makers want to make not ask ai to make,

It probably changes from person to person, some people are just interested in seeing how their idea comes to life and maybe does something useful in the world.

[Brian_K_White]

500 million years ago a former colleague created "Electric File Clerk" which became profile which became filepro which technically still exists today.

It was a "RAD, rapid application development system basically the proto ms access. The idea was the user is a dentist or lawyer, not a developer, but needs to make their own software because at that time almost no canned software existed yet.

The doctor or florist or whatever could make their own database-backed application without writing a line of code. Just draw screens and define screens and fields and report formats.

No language at all, since no code.

We are talking trs-80 model I here...

[EvanAnderson]

Aside: I support a court who uses a FilePro-based application that dates back, at least, to the mid-90s. I don't have to deal with the actual app-- just the underlying Linux boxes that run it. It seems reasonable.

[Brian_K_White]

In the filepro circles there is a famouse bit of history about a large user that once tried to migrate off of it, because obviously it's crap because it's ancient... and paid some shop to rewrite their existing filepro app in some current db framework, I think an oracle product but I don't remember, and they consumed some large amount of money and years, and in the end failed. The client sued the consultants and it actually went to trial and the lead developer of filepro at the time was called to testify as part of the whole thing.

Point was just, this old thing is certainly old and not exactly natural to integrate with anything else today, but, there must be something there such that it does the job people actually need doing, and even spending millions of $ and many man-years on the most bestest-currentest-modernest-kool-kidsest systems somehow fails to deliver a equivalent actual real world functionality the users already had, let alone better.

As magical as new frameworks undeniably are, there's always just something a bit out of touch, like they make the most sense to the developer of the framework and not the user of the framework.

[EvanAnderson]

BTW, when you say "former colleague" are you referring to _the_ (non-fictional character) Howard Wolowitz?

I don't much care for the show the namesake character was featured in, but between knowing the name from the lore of the TV show and being adjacent filePro I think it's pretty cool to actually talk to somebody who knew him.

[zem]

I would say that if you get the syntax and docs right functional programming paradigms and matching can be very intuitive for non programmers. you don't have to build up a mental model of variables versus objects and passing by value or reference.

[crabbone]

Surprisingly, I've met non-programmers who easily learned languages considered "strange" or difficult to understand by professional programmers (Forth is even somewhat popular among astronomers, but I've also met people using Prolog for their programming needs, even J).

I've worked quite a bit with scientists who mostly use Python for their programming-related tasks. To me, it seems that the reason to work with Python has very little to do with the qualities of the language, rather the tools and the community around it. There's nothing specially intuitive or helpful about Python when it comes to doing scientific stuff, not anymore than, say, in PHP or Lua etc. languages from the same general category (which we don't see used in the same setting). It's the libraries / tools like NumPy and Jupyter that make the difference.

From just looking at EYG, I can't tell if it's a good match for the problem or not. But, really, the language design doesn't seem to play an important role in this context. If it somehow manages to win popularity among the people it's trying to engage -- great! But, unless one has an army of "evangelists" and the marketing budget rivaling GDPs of smaller countries, the success seem to be completely random and unpredictable (with quite low success rate).