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Comment by justinator | Hacker News Reader

You can't just freehand them with a rectangle tool and a few canned textures.

I mean, why not? If I'm a small business, and I need a custom (in-house) app, AND I could do it myself with little training, I'd rather do that then not have the business. (Again) how many businesses run on Excel Spreadsheets? Not every business can hire a programming firm to make a boutique app that's used by 100 people.

But I'm also one of those, "Why did FileMaker Pro die?" kinda person. And I still write Perl. I'm a weirdo, but I'm a pragmatic weirdo that likes to get stuff done.

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I do a lot of freelance and I can't tell you how many businesses I've worked with who had some need that was just a smidge more than their current software would allow. If there was something in between using an interface and learning a full-fledged programming stack from first principles, it would go a long way.

Part of this goes towards getting people -- both today's mainstream developers and users -- to think hard about what using a personal computer should mean.

I can't think of a better definition of programming than "telling a computer what to do." That should be the first hint.

This came up the other day in a different thread but I think it bears repeating. I am generally an Electron hater, but there’s this huge opportunity for applications to provide access to a JS REPL inside Electron apps to give users the ability to tweak apps to fit their needs. Not just a “we’ve included scripting functionality” like eg VBA gives you, but access to the whole damned thing!

I can dream anyway.

That's part of the reason why Emacs has this kind of cult following. There's always something you need that's "just a smidge more" than your Emacs can do, but it's very easy to just code up that missing bit. It might be not for casual user (requires learning some basics of programming), but then again, the legend goes that secretaries used to use Emacs and like it, for similar reasons people like Excel today - they need something extra, they can make it themselves on the spot.

And another thing people should learn from that, never underestimate secretaries, accountants etc.

It is often good to limit what non admins can do to the system, servers, their computer os etc.

We should also limit who has access to sensitive data.

But I think often companies could be more productive if they taught their employees to script a bit.

> And another thing people should learn from that, never underestimate secretaries, accountants etc.

It is difficult for the modern developer to think of users as anything other than dumb cattle, because doing so would raise ethical concerns about their high-engagement eyeball-farming products.

Back with Multics, secretaries were given Emacs as editor, and they had access to a manual on writing lisp code for it... With no mention anywhere that it was programming in one of the most capable languages of the time (MACLISP on Multics).

In short time, many secretaries that honestly believed that "programming wasn't for them and was too hard" had written lots and lots of automation for their daily tasks. Cava was their Hypercard.

http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html

I've been working on something like this, a visual programming language called BlockStudio [1] 1. www.blockstud.io

> But I'm also one of those, "Why did FileMaker Pro die?" kinda person.

FileMaker is not dead[1], and in fact it's now a highly-rated "Low-Code Platform For Business Developers".[2]

[1] https://www.filemaker.com/ [2] https://content.filemaker.com/2019_FM_forrester_report

>I mean, why not? If I'm a small business, and I need a custom (in-house) app, AND I could do it myself with little training, I'd rather do that then not have the business.

The first company I worked for developed such a system and it worked out very well for them. You would write your UI in XML and your business logic as Postgres stored procedures using either PLPGSQL or any number of other languages with Postgres bindings. They then had a C frontend which would parse the XML and render out the UI using either GTK or HTML. It also had the ability to make arbitrary HTTP requests which allowed for some pretty sophisticated integrations.

Everything about this felt wrong yet it allowed the company to rapidly deliver new functionality and bespoke customizations, on site and often in a matter of hours. It was also simple to the point they could train others in the business (outside of development) to use it.

>Why did FileMaker Pro die?

Did it, really? I still find it amazing. I did wonders with the lightweight version of it that came with Claris/Apple Works

FileMaker Pro is pretty much alive, they have a conference happening in two weeks: https://www.filemaker.com/learning/devcon/

There are many companies using it.

FileMaker Pro is still around.

With new versions that they email me about every couple of days.

> Why did FileMaker die?

IDK, but 80% of web apps were during the 2000s so so interfaces on top of a relational database...

And FileMaker was so superior...

Seems that in computer we try end to think that "worst is better".

In 2010s they still were, but with "relational database" part swapped out for something worse still.

If you squint, you can just see many webapps as taking what would work better as a bunch of MS Access forms, and locking it down from every possible side so that there's a directed flow users can't deviate from, and so that they can't possibly do anything with their data that the webapp owners don't allow.

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