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Comment by TuringTest | Hacker News Reader

There's a third revolution impending, when people learn to write their own ad-hoc software and build custom automations for themselves. This will require much simpler development tools, but we're almost there.

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).

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I still think excel is the leader in this category. Was looking at a roadmap produced in excel the other day, somewhat amazed of what the persons working on it had been able to produce with various workarounds to get it to their liking. It still a rather blunt tool though. But is has the right elements in place, data grids, a workable visualization canvas, some limited automation capacity to tie them together.

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

> I still think excel is the leader in this category.

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnbVCNIh1NA

BTW, several people have created Javascript libraries that follow the simple design of Scratch primitives, so that those can be used within a textual environment.

[1] https://woofjs.com/

[2] https://www.blocklike.org/

Fair enough. I wasn’t thinking of the language actually, more of how they use the painting canvas. The fact that scripts belong to tangible things and not some abstract “background”. Compare VBA and formulas in excel. Formulas naturally belongs to their cells, which is simple, but vba exists in this ambient thing that requires an entirely different abstract model to grasp.

Is this what Apple Shortcuts is trying to achieve?

https://apps.apple.com/au/app/shortcuts/id915249334

I don't know Shortcuts in depth; but the problem with "rule based" tools like this is that they typically don't allow users to build new abstractions, so they don't really count as general programming languages. (You can create first-level abstractions, but they compose poorly).

But yes, being able to create small automations over your own data is a start (see the large success of a tool like IFTT).

Yes, this is a great start. Higher level abstractions can be introduced very gradually.

I second this. I believe apps like Coda/Notion will make a big difference in how people work, think and interact with their computer and mind. Not everyone would invest the time and effort to build what is basically an extension of the mind with these tools, but the ones who do will have an edge in thinking/planning/coordinating/executing I believe.

That's the core value proposition, yes :-)

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.

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