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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

There has been a lot of academic interest in doing something like this for Java, generally with a pitch like "If we took all the scary syntax out of it, programming would be accessible to $GROUP_OF_INTEREST." My personal opinion is that, with the debatable exception of Microsoft Excel, every project along these lines seems to rediscover "Oh yeah, syntax is rather useful for doing non-trivial work" roughly forty five seconds after the conclusion of their most advanced published tech demo.

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True, but the goal here is not necessarily "make programming more accessible".

The goal is "make it possible to create an app with NO programming knowledge".

The ability to create "trivial" apps and then run them on your cell phone can be exciting for many people. I think this will increase the appeal of Android as a consumer device. Of course, a big flood of trivial (tool-created) apps in the Android market may reduce some of that appeal, but overall, this seems like a good move by Google.

It will be interesting to see if more people buy Android phones because they can now create and run their own apps on their phones

Making apps is programming - you can make it more accessible, but "programming" is still a good definition of the activity. Making programs with no programming knowledge sounds about as useful as driving forklift trucks with no forklift-truck-driving-knowledge.

There have been visual app generators before, for other platforms. None of them took the world by storm, and mostly were very limited and/or actually quite hard to learn - different from regular programming languages, but still with a learning curve. The devil's in the details, and a good programming language "makes easy things easy and hard things possible". App generators often succeed very well at the "makes easy things easy" part but fail at the "make hard things possible" bit.

Phones are a bit different though.

On the Internet, we saw a lot of 'personal home pages' which were basically globally accessible bookmark menus.

Those had limited utility because they were public and only available when on-line.

By comparison something as 'easy' as Frontpage would be great for making a personal single-purpose app for your phone. It doesn't have to do a great deal to be useful - perhaps it would just show the RSS feed from your school events society. Maybe it would just make a ping sound when you touched the screen, or be a really simple game just for the fun of it.

If we are talking about 15 minutes of setup and build time then the apps really don't have to do much, and they only have to be useful to one person to get made. But it makes owning the phone much more interesting to people who are a bit geeky but don't code, which is important for Google.

(Compare to the iPhone - where the easiest option is to set up a web server and build a single-purpose web site. That's easy for us but for a 10 year old it's a huge barrier.)

you dont write an OS in GWBasic, but it sure does makes you interested in CS, rather than just watching some stupid crap on itunes

Excel is one of the most widely used programming environments out there, and it's pretty visual.

It is, but scratch the surface and you're in a world of macro syntax ugliness. Conventional programming languages are better than that. "NO code" yeah right. And that's not even the "hard stuff" that can't be done in excel.

http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/images/ScreenShotAbo...

That does not look like no programming knowledge to me.

Has anyone ever actually demonstrated that a "visual" programming language is easier for non-programmers to learn programming than a language with a relatively simple syntax, like Python? How is that picture significantly easier to understand than

    when Button1.click:
        Screen1.BackgroundColor = Blue

One big problem with textual programming is that there are too many places syntax errors can creep in. Lots of 'mundanes', i.e. non-hackers are so used to flexibility with little things like text, punctuation, spacing and capitilization. The rigity that programming languages require would make most programmes written by these people riddled with syntax errors.

Graphical programming removes choices and options. However it also removes ways to make mistakes.

Well, for one, the shape (and colors) of the blocks can inform the user what can and can't fit into the arguments of a function (can't put the pieces with square pegs into the functions with round holes). Or, in your case, what sorts of values can be assigned; the attributes that use colors look different than the ones that need a date and time. Also, the blocks can make it clear where something necessary is missing in the program. Nothing that a good IDE can't do, but all that and more just for the cost of some color coded puzzle pieces.

All of what you are talking about is majorly dependent on the field of development and the tools currently available. Python isn't available or practical for everything.

Try this: http://quickfuseapps.com/app/edit

It's for building voice apps, and believe me, it's easier to learn than anything in the space (VoiceXML, random proprietary APIs, etc.)

Java isn't necessarily easy to learn, and that's all that Android has right now.

Isn't this exactly what Mindstorms uses as it's primary 'programming' tool?

Same reason most people prefer point-and-click games to text adventures. With text it's not obvious what to write next. With a GUI, you can roam around clicking on things until you spot something that looks sensible - it's like Lego. Additionally, you don't have to worry about making typos and not discovering them until compile time.

Code is only a means to an end. If you can achieve the result you want without it, then it's just an obstruction.

Exactly.

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