[Panzerschrek]

I generally don't think it's a good idea to develop a language for non-developers. It was tried before multiple times and the end goal has not been achieved. Sooner or later one realizes, that professional developers are still necessary, even for languages initially designed for "normies". But such a language is typically not good enough for them, it lacks necessary abstractions, flexibility, performance or something else.

We have a lot of examples for this, like COBOL, SQL, Visual Basic.

[viceconsole]

Your three examples historically were successful in achieving widespread usage, and in the case of SQL, shows no sign of disappearing.

[Panzerschrek]

They are widespread, but not among "normies", but professional programmers. That's what I call a failure, since they were initially designed to be used by non-programmers.

[bazoom42]

Because we call someone using a programming language a programmer. But certainly many professionals who arent full-time programmers write Excel formulas or queries.

The intention of SQL was to be used by domain experts rather than computer scientists. I’d say it have been successful at that.

[crowdhailer]

I'm not sure "normies" is the right grouping. I think that is too broad some people are artists and some people just aren't that curious to try. I think a better group to target is "makers" I think that's anyone with enough ambition to at least try and fix a plug or change a lightbulb.

[nylonstrung]

I think this has less to do with design flaws of SQL and more to do with normie users historically not touching databases and query engines directly

[pjmlp]

I am quite sure that plenty of Excel users know BASIC and SQL.

[himata4113]

I would love having the capability of just writing json-esque SQL that has the most basic type checks, alas we live in purgatory with weird build systems to validate queries.

[bazoom42]

What is json-esque SQL?

[seanmcdirmid]

SQL is a real programming language with a super high ceiling if you need to write scalable queries.

[crowdhailer]

I think this is a point I should make more clearly. And there are more examples of programmable environments. Excel being one.

[shuwix]

By your logic ... BASIC is useless. By your logic ... people are born a programmers.

Yet BASIC was literally a first stepping stone for small kids into the World of programming. Most of what we have now is because some 6-7yo kids in 80's and 90's had BASIC and could figure out stuff by themself, without external help.

[broken-kebab]

I don't think this is the logic of the parent, and BASIC wasn't a non-developer PL at all. It was simplified but followed those days' programming practices, and one may say was closer to raw assembler than most today's high-level languages

[esterna]

There is one example that succeeded and became the most widely used programming paradigm on the planet: Spreadsheets

Though you might argue that the "programming language" part was rather accidental

[nylonstrung]

And interestingly using Excel resembles pure functional programming in a lot of ways

[esterna]

And it has array programming features, logging, and (time-travel!) debugging all intuitively graspable for most non-technical people.

I sincerely think there are lots of unlearned lessons in studying Excel.

[pjmlp]

And that is without counting on Lambdas, VBA, Power Query.

[ModernMech]

It’s reactive programming in a functional style. I wouldn’t call it functional reactive programming though because that’s usually used to describe more robust languages like older versions of Elm before TEA.

[pjmlp]

Not only were COBOL, SQL, Visual Basic market successes, as mentioned by others, now non-developers are even using plain English with AI agents.

[ModernMech]

How can you say that when millions of non-programmers are using AI to write programs all of a sudden? The problem isn't with non programmers it's with the languages they've been given are usually written by people who are keen to write languages that conform to their sensibilities rather than the programmer's.

For example: I would say that 1-based indexing is pretty much required for a language targeting non-developers; Excel, SQL, R, Matlab, Cobol, Mathematica, Lua are all 1-indexed and all target non-developers. Most PL devs refuse to do this citing how unnatural it is for themselves to reason about, and how Dijkstra was right about the beauty of 0-based indexes. Sorry, but all that is irrelevant when you're trying to convince a non dev that "Actually it makes a lot of sense that the first thing is called 0". They hear that and they tune out because it asks them to abandon their familiar assumptions too early, and they're unwilling to do that on promises of it getting better.

So the first problem people have in making languages for non-developers is they make it like Python, because Python is considered an easy language for beginners. Big mistake, because then you've only appealed to people for whom Python is appealing. Those are not the people we're trying to get with a non-dev language, and besides we already have Python for that.

You look at the top languages used by non devs and you can see that they appreciate aspects of languages that devs do not, so that's why devs fail so regularly at this. But there are some success stories you point out.

Then there's of course the biggest example you forgot: Excel. And it's not a surprise this one is always forgotten by programmers because despite being a programming language it doesn't follow typical programming language conventions, and as a design artifact it sits well outside the design hornet's nest that is the C/C++/Java/Javascript/Python which comprise most of mainstream programming.

Finally there is LOGO - This one is often missed, but it's a lisp-like language that allowed small children to program complex applications like differential physics coursework which grad students find difficult to program, and they're able to do it simply by reframing the program into something they are familiar with like their own body rather than abstract concepts like integration.

They called this "body syntonic reasoning" and it was impressive because the language itself contained the pedogogical framing to enable this. If it hadn't and just said "Here's what a for loop is, now write programs!" it wouldn't have worked. This shows you in order to get non-developers to code, you have to approach them with an uncommon level of empathy for how they thin, and I don't know if most lang developers are up to that task.

[pjmlp]

> Most PL devs refuse to do this citing how unnatural it is for themselves to reason about, and how Dijkstra was right about the beauty of 0-based indexes

Thankfully I learnt to program back in the days where languages could go both ways, or even better you could explicitly set the lower and upper bounds.

Thus as programmer I never agreed with him.

And it isn't as if programmers of some famous 0 based index languages don't do indexing errors all the time.

[looksjjhg]

So you’re saying everyone should stop doing what they’re doing bc someone failed at it in the past? If something doesn’t interest you or motivate you it doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing