They just use spreadsheets.
Many of the lofty sounding concepts of programming were invented to make things simpler. Show them from a right aspect, and they are quite approachable to a non-engineer.
> My hypothesis
> Developers deal with two broad categories of work.
> - Describing the logic of the problem they are solving using language constructs like if, loop, var etc. > - Working with computers to run those problems using constucts like $PATH, /var/tmp and AWS.
> There are a lot of humans who can do the first work fine but don’t have the time to master the second category. I call these humans “makers”.
the idea seems to be to make an end-user programming language for makers. makers want to make not ask ai to make, and they are capable of writing code, actually, it's just all the computer plumbing that's too much of a pain.
a sophisticated programming language to write personal software that cuts out the computer plumbing would be something i'd love. i'm not fully clear how that would be done, but i like the thought.
It was a "RAD, rapid application development system basically the proto ms access. The idea was the user is a dentist or lawyer, not a developer, but needs to make their own software because at that time almost no canned software existed yet.
The doctor or florist or whatever could make their own database-backed application without writing a line of code. Just draw screens and define screens and fields and report formats.
No language at all, since no code.
We are talking trs-80 model I here...
Point was just, this old thing is certainly old and not exactly natural to integrate with anything else today, but, there must be something there such that it does the job people actually need doing, and even spending millions of $ and many man-years on the most bestest-currentest-modernest-kool-kidsest systems somehow fails to deliver a equivalent actual real world functionality the users already had, let alone better.
As magical as new frameworks undeniably are, there's always just something a bit out of touch, like they make the most sense to the developer of the framework and not the user of the framework.
I don't much care for the show the namesake character was featured in, but between knowing the name from the lore of the TV show and being adjacent filePro I think it's pretty cool to actually talk to somebody who knew him.
I remember when he went on that trip. It's season 6 ep 4, The Re-Entry Minimization, the last few seconds. Both Howie's are in a diner.
He is absolutely a character. I haven't talked to him in a few years because I left that company and we don't live near each other, and I am just a shitty friend that desn't call people, but I really love that man.
At the 1st or 2nd xmas dinner when the company was small and we did such things, I had an HP Jornada pda that ran WinCE and I had managed to get a dos emulator running on it, with the dos version of fp in that, and I showed it to him, and he immediately closed that and went looking for porn on the device. (one of the main features of the device was simply the large color screen in the time of palm-v)
He is the reason I finally learned to outgrow the very plain rural american diet I was raised on. He brought me to an Indian place he liked and suggested I try the falafel. I had only recently moved to NJ but had not yet appreciated the stupendous variety we enjoy in this area. All that weird stuff was just weird stuff. Becoming adventurous with food is a non-trivial change to you whole life. That one little thing is like a huge thing I can thank him for. Oh and he got me that job in the first place which ended up being rather big life change!
It probably changes from person to person, some people are just interested in seeing how their idea comes to life and maybe does something useful in the world.
A good example of the actual tool is FoxPro and similar (even better than MS Access based on the ideals of the article) and I observed being actually used by occasional "developers" that need more than Access/Vb/Excel.
I'm on the hunt for it with https://tablam.org but the main major pain point is to bring the actual UI. You can go anywhere with syntax and such, is how you connect to the rest where the magic must prove is real.
I've worked quite a bit with scientists who mostly use Python for their programming-related tasks. To me, it seems that the reason to work with Python has very little to do with the qualities of the language, rather the tools and the community around it. There's nothing specially intuitive or helpful about Python when it comes to doing scientific stuff, not anymore than, say, in PHP or Lua etc. languages from the same general category (which we don't see used in the same setting). It's the libraries / tools like NumPy and Jupyter that make the difference.
From just looking at EYG, I can't tell if it's a good match for the problem or not. But, really, the language design doesn't seem to play an important role in this context. If it somehow manages to win popularity among the people it's trying to engage -- great! But, unless one has an army of "evangelists" and the marketing budget rivaling GDPs of smaller countries, the success seem to be completely random and unpredictable (with quite low success rate).