I think he was talking about domestic first class. Tech was even more americentric back then.

What I learned from that article is that he helped kill a visual programming language project at Microsoft that could have revolutionized the way non-programmers interact with computers (the rest is interesting, of course).

Visual programming is an oxymoron

Programmers often get this idea that programming has to be "hard" to be "programming". Perl vs. C++, Visual Basic vs C++, Ruby vs. Java, etc.

Check out these:

- Pure Data (http://puredata.info/)

- Max (https://cycling74.com/products/max-features)

- My own (discontinued): http://www.nitrogenlogic.com/docs/palace/

My MO with technology is that easy things should be automated, and hard things should be made easier. Visual programming is one tool in the toolbox for leveling up technology and people's access to it.

It doesn’t but it is hard to do it right, see my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19350721

https://scratch.mit.edu/ is visual programming (dragging puzzle pieces) and it really opens up programming to all kinds of young kids, girls who want to make animations, and so forth. I programmed a prototype of my first Android app with a version of this called MIT App Inventor.

GoAnywhere is mostly-visual programming that puts light ETL within reach of business analysts. https://i.imgur.com/ypH6IZC.png

Visual programming isn’t scallable or transferrable. Giving such powers to people to use in production is super risky. Ok to prototype, but letting people design enterprise systems with 0 knowledge about system design or source control is extremely risky.

Yes empowering people is great, but we live in age where software developement is about to get regulated, people routinely die from seemingly innocent systems.

With great power comes great responsibility.