Comment by arxpoetica

Excel is a perfect example. The core Excel experience is basically functional programming on a virtual machine with a matrix address space laid out visually right in front of you. It even looks like traditional programming if you dive into the VBA stuff, which plenty of non-technical specialists, including MBAs and managers, do on a regular basis in the pursuit of solving their problems.

Any specialist user willing to invest some time in learning their tools can do this. A culture develops around it.

And replying to parent: those efforts around teaching 'civilians' to code are probably misguided. The investment needs to be in adding scripting and programmability into existing line of business tool, not on encouraging people to sit in front of an isolated REPL disconnected from any business value or context.

Two other more contemporary examples are the Android app Tasker, and the website IFTTT ( https://ifttt.com/ ).

There's something about calling it programming that turns certain people off. I remember a story about a freshman in a physical mechanics class that complained about all the MATLAB code they had to write. The professors retort was that they were free to use a slide rule instead, and that particular freshman stopped complaining.

But you're right. The mere act of calling it programming is somehow a problem. It's as if doing programming pigeonholes you into being a programmer until the end of days.

I concur with your assesment. The point is not to turn a syntax into an AST into processor code. The point is to provide things of value and 'easy' computing platforms targeting users who are not professional programmers create tremendous amounts of end user value.

Sadly, when I point this out professional programmers often go 'pffft - that's not real programmming' as if being knees deep in stack traces and gigantic code bases was a something with intrinsic value.

I'm not sure I agree with you about Photoshop. Perhaps (probably) there are photoshop macros or pipelines that are closer to programming, but most people use Photoshop purely in an interactive mode. They enter commands directly, and the logic stays in the users' heads, not in the computer.

Photoshop is more like a REPL tied to an image-processing library than it is a programming language.

Remember when search engines had Boolean operators?

I would say that Photoshop is a toolbox of predefined tools. If using that is coding, then people are also coding when they choose and use a screwdriver, some sandpaper, a hammer and some glue in succession from their physical toolbox to get a job done. That the operations happen electronically and that they are implemented as complex mathematical transformations of pixels doesn't change that.

Excel isn't much different in my view: most people are only using a very limited set of predefined tools to get a job done. Often badly: it is well known that there are many bugs in important, company critical Excel sheets. Excel seems like coding because it is mostly used to perform the fundamental mathematical operations we all associate with coding. But if that is coding, then so is constructing a Rube-Goldberg machine for a specific task from the parts you happen to have available. A nice exercise in problem solving under constraints. Which certainly has something in common with coding. But that doesn't make it coding.

Yep, great examples. Also, pretty much any experienced Photoshop user will create their own actions to automate common operations. And then you have things like workflows in Alfred.

This is a driving force behind the pedagogy of SICP -- to think in recursive functions. If you can break down your task into sub-problems and describe them clearly you just have to put a few parenthesis around it.

Programming isn't so much about the "code" or syntax; it's semantics and intent aligned with the machine.

If you can express your problem clearly then the program practically writes itself.

That's only because you think your thought exists and is correct. Programming forces you to confront the fact that it isn't, and that there are many aspects of it that you've overlooked.

As someone who has worked with junior devs before, that sounds like an absolute nightmare.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with being junior. But the rate that requirements are misinterpreted even by intelligent humans is, I think, a fundamental reason why programming isn't doable by the masses yet.

It's not because computers are hard, it's because knowing what we actually specifically want them to do is.

I remember someone referring to this as "intent driven programming". I once worked for a company that made a business rules engine. The idea was to describe a flowchart to the system and the software would ask what you wanted to do at each step of the flowchart in a top down manner till you fleshed out the whole program ..

That's likely AI-complete.

I omitted: ...and create so many new problems there will be years of work in it to clean the mess up.

Been in "IT" for a few decades, I've seen it happen in front of my own eyes time and time again.

The only self-help tool that has lasted so far has been the spreadsheet, and even that has gone horribly off the rails in many companies.

I'm reminded of rms's anecdote about secretarial staff learning to write Emacs macros at MIT because they didn't realise it was programming.

This suggests that current, important and well-meaning attempts to get non-programmers to meet code head-on as code may be misguided. Programming is generally easier if you're not thinking about how much it isn't something you do.

I don't believe that there is no such thing as a right brained person. I think this is a cultural myth. Same as, "you only use 10% of your brain's power". These, and similar, are false memes - iow hokum.

Precision is not the only important element in programming. There's a level of abstraction, such as found in the field of semiotics, that is highly important to the world of computer science.