Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

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> It's what annoys me about low-code solutions - it's like trying to write your novel by linking pre-drawn cartoon squares together in innovative ways.

There's a reason societies which switched from hieroglyphics to alphabets have higher literacy rates—the best way to promote widespread literacy is to make it easy and accessible.

Before the pandemic shut us down, I was a volunteer teacher at Girls Who Code. We used Scratch, which I was a bit skeptical of at first, but then I watched the ten-year-old students struggle to type a sentence at three words per minute. In Scratch that didn't matter—they could create all sorts of programs.

In a different context, while I'm not personally a fan of complex spreadsheets, they seem to be effective for a lot of people, who I suspect would otherwise struggle with Python.

To be sure, Scratch and Excel are still much slower and clunkier than "real", text-based languages. But I'm not convinced that typing words into a text editor is the ultimate way to create software. And even if it is, we've got to find a way to make this stuff easier, because I don't want to live in a society where a handful of elites are able to make computers do their bidding, and everyone else is left to consume the scraps offered from on high.

Agreed - many tasks can be done with more accessible tools.

It's why Excel is so popular.

It's why modal editors suck for the majority of humanity. For most people and most applications, WYSIWYG is fine and allows people to use the computer to do their work.

We'll still need the more sophisticated tooling for a long time, but even that becomes more niche once it gets really good. Most developers are not writing assembly or machine code. Layers of abstraction can and do work, but every time a new one comes it's often viewed skeptically.

Nocode is a little different in the way that excel is limiting too, but that doesn't mean it can still solve a lot of the problem space for a lot of people if done well. Introducing young kids to programming seems like a reasonable place for it.

I think AI assisted programming will be interesting, both in the form of Karpathy's blog post: https://karpathy.medium.com/software-2-0-a64152b37c35 and also just to assist alongisde the dev. GPT-3 style, "center this on the page" -> correct CSS. Fast feedback via NLP here will be really interesting and helpful. We used to have to look up stuff in books, then there was google and stack overflow, it'd be nice to be able to ask random questions and get the answer instantly in code in front of you.

This is a great related blog post if you haven't read it: http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/

No.

Excel is a local optimum - a hill on the way up the mountain.

Yes, scratch and excel are good solutions for the issue of "it takes years to become software literate and I have six week evening classes to fit it in, what shall i teach"

but that's the answer to the wrong question.

Not everyone who drives a car needs to be able to rebuild the engine.

Not everyone who writes a video game needs to write the physics engine.

Not everyone who needs to analyze a dataset needs to write SQL.

Abstractions and tools exist at levels that provide value to people solving problems. The more accessible the tools are, the wider the net of people that can leverage them.

A minority of voices can loudly yell in a corner about how everyone needs to use modal editors and write their own assembly while the rest of the world moves on and ignores them.

Eh... SQL is like the steering wheel in your first analogy. I'm not compiling or writing SQLite from scratch, simply operating it.

I think saying Excel & co are just shortcuts to do the same thing worse, is a bit uncharitable. I have very little experience with spreadsheets and a fair bit of experience with imperative programming (I guess declarative too from SQL, which is actually quite transferable to gSheets formulas).

I was sorting out a spreadsheet which I could use to keep track of income events and display information on taxes at different brackets, running totals for income & tax, capital gains events, and spent about 3-4 hours working on it, even though the formulas were all new to me.

The same thing would have taken me far longer as a python program.

Spreadsheets are really just the perfect way to operate on tabular data and display tabular data that has been transformed through a cascading series of transformation functions. I don't think it's possible to do this as efficiently through imperative programming.

> There's a reason societies which switched from hieroglyphics to alphabets have higher literacy rates—the best way to promote widespread literacy is to make it easy and accessible.

Source? This seems to have a lot more to do with socio-economics and politics than linguistics.

I see them as all tied together. Rising literacy rates increase standards of living. Rising standards of living leave time to learn to read. More people reading creates pressure to make reading easier. And so the cycle continues.

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