It’s not that programming ergonomics are stagnant, it’s that all of the gains have been made by professionals. And the tooling is nearly impossible to leverage for a beginner environment because all of the assumptions of a pro developer are built in to their design.
The innovations are there, Heroku, Git, CSS, Markdown... these are all triumphs of programming ergonomics. They’re just all inevitably coopted by professional “Foundations” and amended to the maximum level a Pro developer can handle. JavaScript is almost useless for beginners now because the tooling is so complex, but full time front end devs can crank out HTTP packets like no ones business.
So you will need to watch those developments and lean on their ideas and some of the low level tooling if you ever hope to build a beginner environment. But you can’t use the tools themselves.
Still, if you start with SmallTalk you will fail. If Chris Granger and Bret Victor started their and failed, you will fail too, because those guys are rockstars.
You need to take the ideas being tested in the Pro tools and use them, without adopting the Pro implementations or even the interfaces. It’s or easy.
It doesn’t take a rockstar to make progress here, and anyways, I’ve been relatively successful on the academic side (e.g. just got a 10 year influential paper award for my 2007 live programming paper). I don’t think Bret Victor failed so much as lost interest, and he accomplished a great deal in getting people interested in this area again. Chris hasn’t really failed either, he is still young. And let’s not forget all the ex-HARCers...
Also, not all of us see this as a make programming more accessible problem; e.g. that’s not my thing, I really want to improve programming en masse. But we all agree the existing way is a dead end and we need to experiment ei5h radically different approaches.
It would seem that practically no programmer's tool has ever received the attention to interface detail that is common in the best games.
Generalized AI is like practical fusion, always 20 years away. I mean, it will come eventually, but until then...there is still value in making humans better.
I know, and I rewrote my post several times before submitting it, trying to minimize the harshness. But the pattern with Granger is pretty obvious, isn't it? Grandiose ambitions, over-commitment, and a resulting failure to ship.
LightTable and Eve are still very influential and inspiring even if they aren't successful. I am personally glad they existed, as they provide experience and lessons for future efforts.
Most of them a con men, selling something they know will never work, especially on kickstarter and the like.
This was nothing unique, it's something people have been trying to do since computers were invented and it has failed every single time. COBOL was conceived with the idea that people in other disciplines would be able to do their own programming.
When there is every reason to think you will fail and you ask people for money to try then you start to look a lot like those con men.
A less asshole-y phrasing would be "I wonder if he had reduced his ambitions somewhat, it might have had more chance to succeed".
If you reign in your ambition, well, isn't that why innovation in the programming experience field is so stagnant (basically stuck at the Smalltalk level) in the first place? We should be free from disdain to take risks, possibly lose, with a chance of hitting it big.