Furthermore, the real revolution was in making both of these widely accessible. This nourishes and harnesses far more human potential.
Apps sort of make this possible in a limited way, but it's common people is limited to whatever developers thought of. Therefore their needs are mediated by a caste of priests, which have access to the sacred knowledge for building and adapting the available tools.
A widespread literacy for building automations would change the current focus of smartphones for media consumption and multiply common people as builders of automations (with all its implications in society in terms of security and new dynamics of people interacting with automations of varying quality).
Though I still have to find a Nocode platform that combines the powerful tracking tools of developer's IDEs with the simplicity for building automations in a functional language found in a spreadsheet.
I’m thinking the same elements presented in an environment perhaps more like Scratch could work. A kind of whiteboard metaphor where objects are independently scriptable, ad some data flow modeling and data source capacity to that and there could be something a bit less blunt
Yes, definitely. The "reactive functional" programming paradigm of the spreadsheet is radically more understandable for end users than the imperative, as it doesn't require keeping a mental model of state changes in memory.
Fortunately, React has popularized this reactive functional paradigm and it is no longer confined to spreadsheets.
> I’m thinking the same elements presented in an environment perhaps more like Scratch could work
An approach of visual building blocks could help for learning, though Scratch is imperative so it has all the trappings that make a language hard to learn for non-programmers, plus all the inconveniences of editing a visual language (much more cumbersome than editing text).
I'd rather have a "structure editor"[1] for editing a textual language (like the spreadsheet, but with a tree representation instead of a grid one), which added enhanced visual representations over the base tree. You know, like the IDEs developers use, but with a functional reactive language that mixed code and data, like the spreadsheet does.
But yes, being able to create small automations over your own data is a start (see the large success of a tool like IFTT).