A personal experience of a programmer who worked in a dozen different industries and in different roles up to CIO level is that non-programmers do not need tools but training. Once people raise to the level of their incompetence, they do not go back to school but persist in the old way of working or find comfortable workarounds.

Catching the moment when someone can not do their job efficiently anymore is an HR problem, and businesses can not rely on introspection and self-evaluation to work in this situation.

One of the worst type of projects we did was migrating overgrown excel bookshelves to a real database/app. The level of inconsistency and bare errors you’ll meet there is fubar. 90% chance of an integration failure because an entire business is not ready for that much to change and formalize.

That said, I believe that “dumbness” and non-evolution of excel (as a biggest player) is a root cause. If it wasn’t just a bunch of cells with chaotic references, but suggested a user to think in a strict “tabular datasets with comments, RLS and history” way, things could be much better (or worse, depending on how you use it).

Basically, in “show me your data, not code” excel is the latter, and that’s pushed to an innocent user. The result is pretty obvious.

From what I've heard, Lotus Improv (1991, failed 1996) was intended as a spreadsheet where each data set was stored in a separate namespace/object/table, which had named columns/rows, or even more than 2 dimensions. Apparently Quantrix is a successor used in the business/financial world, but is unfortunately not free or open-source. That's a shame, as I want something of that sort for casual scientific computation or statistical number crunching. Maybe I can use Python pandas or R dataframes, but spreadsheets have the useful trait that they're functional and side-effect-free, unlike scripts or notebooks.

Sounds like Access which always felt to me like a stepping stone between Excel and SQL Server with Visual Basic. My guess is that's what Microsoft has in mind anyway

You mean turn it into a different tool called Access or formerly FoxPro?

I see. Iirc, Access was too much developer-oriented last time I checked it around 20 years ago. As a developer you can just step up and try to take control, but users have no such courage. If excel merged parts of access later into a single product, suggesting, but not forcing users to maintain at least a partial scheme, then maybe. Sort of in-place gradual migration without “work here or go back” next morning ultimatums.

I agree with you, it's a basic problem for any skill. Anybody can draw, but drawing fine art requires the knowledge of the structure and tools used to draw it.

I suspect trying to build a programming language to stop having to think like a trained programmer, is a doomed project.

But, I can well imagine an art assisting program that I can feed my doodle to that can return a photographic (or other artistic) rendering of a person in that pose, even such that I can rotate the image, alter the pose, perhaps even animate it.

I still perhaps wouldn't understand why I should have chosen other poses, or why the lighting doesn't work, or why my material choice for the clothing fabrics hampers the expression I was seeking ... but it seems like an artist could come and touch up those elements.

Surely a similar level of thing could be done for programs (eventually)?

I'm a non-programmer in a new work environment where I'm feeling like I want to modify all the programs and add some functionality. In particular I've a lex-parse process I'd like to automate, relatively easy to describe sufficient to do it (with time I'll probably do it myself in PHP/python). But, doing that "doodle it" routine for such a simplistic app would be really useful.

People always want to have that "now draw the rest of the fucking owl" step automated without them having to acquire the skill and do the hard and messy work to make it happen.

It doesn't work that way, and I'm relatively convinced it never will, within my lifetime. It's an inherently squishy target that it's trying to hit, with so many unstated assumptions and constraints. Trying to auto-scaffold software is worse.

Everything is easy when you're at the hand-wavy wireframes and stories stage; all the complexity and stupid yet necessary, yak shaving is glossed over, unless you have a engineer sitting in to rain on the parade.

>but it seems like an artist could come and touch up those elements.

I don't think you can have artists or programmers 'touch up' a generated model post-facto without making compromises on the valuable bit of the project. Programmers will always be needed to understand the program inside and out, so it can be tweaked and controlled. Artists will always be needed to define the piece from top to bottom, so it can be controlled.

Either that or lots of hair being ripped out trying to control why the top lip on the 3d model keeps moving up and down when technically there's no muscle in your top lip, and it makes the one scene your big dramatic moment look janky as hell so you have to spend nights trying to figure out why the ML program made that, and it turns out nobody knows except the guy who made it and he's off in the bahamas helping take care of his sick wife so you have to scour the tech support community for hours...

Or that perfect line you drew across the face of a landscape painting is now pushed off to one side from running it through an art-style-transfer ML program and that destabilizes all the hidden geometry you were relying on to make the piece feel alive and now you have to know why the program did that, if you want to change it.

>Surely a similar level of thing could be done for programs (eventually)?

Yeah I think so. It's coming quite rapidly. Two minute papers is a scary youtube channel.

Any generative painting, cg model or computer program is going to fill the "kinda good enough" category and change the job of the trained professional to be controlling all the assumptions built into the generative program. You will make a super-powered tool, which is awesome, but alas human knowledge/skill/brains remains different to computers.

It's very hard to do high-quality generative art/music/poetry/anything without a complete model of human cultural associations, perceptions, and metaphorical frameworks for conceptualisation.

As you say, most generative work is empty because it's just form. Human creators manipulate form to communicate content. There's a message, and art is judged as much on the sophistication of the message as on the form it's carried in.

Form without content can be an interesting technical experiment, but it's culturally massless and kind of boring. Not to mention wrong in a destabilising way - like someone speaking random syllables that make occasional sense, but don't form a coherent message.

So the most successful generative work cheats by automating processes of cultural reference - like style transfer - or by adding levels of formal complexity that would be very difficult to handle by hand, but can at least produce something that seems a little original and surprising.

The less successful work doesn't even get that far.

Automated software generation is going to have similar problems. You have to parse intent, and then balance it against practicality. Getting that right is so hard humans really struggle with it, so I can't see machines being better at it any time soon.

> Form without content can be an interesting technical experiment, but it's culturally massless and kind of boring. Not to mention wrong in a destabilising way - like someone speaking random syllables that make occasional sense, but don't form a coherent message.

Couldn't read that without being reminded of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisencolinensinainciusol

As the composer says, "I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn't mean anything." If you haven't heard it, pull it up on YouTube — it's quite an experience.

...actually, there is one part of programming which already fits that description perfectly: Tuning some badly-performing SQL.

Seriously, look at the EXPLAIN of a complicated postgres query - hash joins, index scans, bitmap heap scans, materializing intermediate tables, and so on - it does the described conversion of high-level SQL to some really complicated code, and someone with in-depth knowledge can later use the plan to tweak the database or query to improve performance.

Aha! You perfectly expressed why I'm turned off by much of modern art - it's form, but no content (though sometimes the lack of content is the content, in a meta way, but it still makes for boring art).

I can’t tell whether this is “I just want to describe the high level and have an expert do the hard bits” (that’s what consultants do and how things normally work), or if it’s Dilbert Pointy haired boss “if I don’t understand it, it must be simple” where you imply the part you can do as an unskilled person is the important part, and the part an expert spends years learning is the trivia which can be tweaked after your important part is done - if it’s even needed at all.

Poser is one possible “3D human in a pose” software since 1995, like python and Delphi and Visual Basic are your rapid application development (RAD) tools that have been trying to do “programming as doodles” for years.

By the point you say “lex-parse process” you’ve already narrowed the scope from all possible software to a tiny area and used a lot of expertise to know that’s even a thing.

Choosing arrangement of 7 English letters has 8 billion or so possibles, “real words which people probably know” is four or five orders of magnitude smaller space of choices; maybe I just need to grunt some sounds to express what I want and a writer can tidy up the details of my comment later. But the choice of words is dozens of small choices which are inseparable from expressing myself. A writer, a consultant, doesn’t make your idea, they make their idea of your idea.

An artist could surely tell you why the choice of clothing doesn’t work, but the time you’ve got your artwork expressing what you want to the level where the choice of clothing fabric is the only thing left to tidy up, you are an artist already and have saved none of the important effort. You’re hiring Mozart to tell you why b-flat sounds off some fourteen minutes into your symphony.

It’s like gaining expertise is narrowing a space of options by orders of magnitude until we can jump close to a solution quickly. Being a non-expert is like assuming there is only a small space of possibilities that everts deal with and if we try to solve the problem we must end up in that space too and then all we need is an expert to nudge us to a settled location nearby. But instead we don’t see how big the space of billions of possibilities is and we go very far away, and an expert can only do the hard work of moving our solution to the space of possible answers - which is basically all the work and almost no better than starting from scratch.

It’s almost like we need the expert to jump near the solution space and then the non expert to nudge the details towards what they’d prefer. The program draws for you and you chose the clothing fabric and lighting. Like a computer game avatar generator where you just choose the hair colour and T-shirt colour - and equally unsatisfying because it’s not at all like you imagine you could express if only you knew what the expert knew.

>where you imply the part you can do as an unskilled person is the important part //

It's the important part, it's not the difficult part.

Like "I want a square, four tier cake with baby-blue royal icing, using a light fruit cake". That's super easy to say, hard to achieve. But the vital bit is contained in the simple definition.

The only other thing to say at this juncture is that in general there are two experts, domain-expert and programmer.

>I just need to grunt some sounds to express what I want and a writer can tidy up the details //

Well yes, we already have algorithmic story generation (eg ScienceDirect webpages), you "grunt" the topic and the program fills in the details.

And the cake definition includes a lot of learned knowledge about humans, foods, rituals, pleasurable tastes, aesthetically pleasing looks; you practically are a domain expert on wedding cake already, you know what is possible, roughly how much it costs, how the difficulty scales with size, what isn’t possible, what isn’t reasonable, what options are available, how people will react, down to a very small scope of possibilities. what’s the cake equivalent for Martians who don’t eat and don’t have weddings and may not see in the human visual spectrum?

I want a thing which will be a centre of attention at an appropriate moment of their existence which their senses will experience .. an appropriate sensation to convey .. to achieve the appropriate goal of goodwill, at an appropriate amount of resource expenditure?

Does that still cover the important bit? If I say I want peace among nations, have I just done the important bit of international diplomacy, and it just needs some experts to tidy up the details?

The difference between your cake and real life programs is that business processes tend to be rife with exceptions and details — frequently exceptions that are unknown at initial design time.

The whole reason for the existence of iterative processes like Scrum and friends is that your premise doesn't hold in the world of software, because then we could just use a waterfall process and be on time and budget every time.

Yes, whenever I've had to help people struggling with their tools I found the problem starts well before they reach for the keyboard. They usually have problems decomposing the requirements to the constituent parts, often they can't even explain what they are trying to achieve.

I think iOS Shortcuts gets pretty close to a programming language for normal people. You aren't going to write anything super-complex, but regular users can eliminate some pain points in their daily grind with a small amount of effort.

You’re assuming such a language is necessary is where this goes wrong.

Non-technical people should be able to use their native cultures language to query for answers. Or in the case of scientists & mathematicians, the well defined symbols & glyphs of their field.

Programming is the act of organizing information for a specific context, ideally efficiently to the computer, but that’s not a requirement. Clearly organized results are the only real requirement of software. All the rules we add on these days are to the benefit of corporate keeping things tidy by pretending making software is like building a car.

As someone getting into data science as a hobby, I have no interest in Python or R syntax. Like with PGP & a host of other issues, terrible UX is an impediment, and an artificial shield for those that slog through learning what is really superfluous crap given their actual task of making sense of business data.

Give me an app where I can select a database, and compose a math equation with nothing but plain math, as like React components, or a word processor with scaled up Unicode symbols, or use a game engine like Unreal, for all I care.

And for day to day life things like Siri are fine.

This is my huge beef with the tech world is believing everyone needs to fetishize source code to use a computer.

The “design is life” era has resulted in a ton of boring/limited business “apps”, and over designed one off UX that lacks broad application.

Software as a marketplace in general is suffering the App Store problem: it’s so easy to copy-paste SOMETHING out the door via Github or however, we’re socializing around the most visible, IMO, well known concepts, minor iterations on known information.

Often wonder if there’s a theory there that might explain why society is where it is lately: we’re not generating enough emotionally unique information. Just fetishizing minor improvements to well known emotional norms.

I have a friend, an engineer but not a programmer, who wrote a fortran program he's been using for decades to solve real problems.

But then recently he had to solve it for 10 different things instead of one. So he copy/pasted his calculations 10 times. He said the problem he was running into now was when he tweaked something, he had to change something in 10 places.

I think that's how normal people solve problems. They just bumble ahead doing what they know will work, but it's not pretty.

As a programmer and every day user of really advanced Excel shenanigans, I can confirm your view is pretty spot on. The fact that I have the mental model of a programmer means I instinctively follow best practices that non-programmers simply can't get into their heads. Namely: keeping data and presentation separate, DRY, the concept of named variables, understanding how array formulas work and why you can map functions to intermediate in-memory vectors, the list goes on...

> Imagine we build the ideal programming language that both technical and non-technical humans alike can understand. What does it look like?

I think it would look like a component architecture, with Elm syntax.

As someone that barely programs but still hacks on open-source, I just want the code for one thing to be in one place, not spread out across 4 different files.

And I want one action/object to have just one name. Not three names like createServer, newServer, server, etc

It would depend on the scope of what people are trying to achieve, at a certain point of complexity you pass from being a "non programmer" to being a programmer due to all of the inferred learning you get from experience.

I know a handful of non programers who can automates tasks in their everyday workflow but as you say they're not maintainable pieces of software or particularly transferable, they are custom tools they create for their own flow.

Your input makes perfect sense! Is Corda the tool they need to "upgrade" their capabilities? Or is it something deeper that comes from "actual programming".

We seem to understand what a programmer is and what is not, but the "blurred line" between the hackers and the paper pushers is unknown.

> A non-technical person CAN indeed make software... he just can't make maintainable software, and eventually his incompetence backfires.

Sure, and then they just pass it off to a competent technical person. It sure would be convenient if these people used the same language! Right now, when a non-programmer starts a project in Excel, and then hands it to a programmer to make into a good, maintainable version (perhaps as a native application, or a web application), the programmer has to start from scratch. That's an awkward discontinuity.

There's no reason I see it always has to be that way. We just haven't prioritized the ability for a non-technical person to make something, and also for a technical person to be able to pick it up and turn it into a full system.

I think you're wrong. System thinking and abstraction are required, unless the users have some mileage in it or a natural talent, they will hit a wall real quick.

I think you're right. System thinking and abstraction are natural talents. Not everyone is good at them.

I used to know someone who didn't get basic algebra. She wasn't stupid in other ways, but she just couldn't make that leap from arithmetic to the first level of symbolic abstraction.

If you spend all of your time working with people who find abstraction easy, it's hard to understand that a lot of people really don't.

note that I said training or talent, I don't think these topics are secrets only accessible to few, but thinking the tool is the craft is misguided. Even in college, I'd use C or Java blindly and made a mess. Anyways, you need to ensure some ideas are understood before letting people "program".

One possible explanation for why non-technical people "can't" build software is simply that they don't want to learn how to do it. But that isn't the problem that Corda is trying to solve, I gather. The client avatar for Corda is, I reckon, the guy who wants to "hit the ground running" and become able to speak "software" to a programmer.

Yep, more people should be starting from spreadsheets and figuring out how to make them more capable of correctness and maintainability, instead of starting from programming concepts and figuring out how to make them more accessible. Most people who work in businesses already know how to program, they just do it in formulas in spreadsheet cells.

The word technical in the original sense means being skilled in a craft. So anyone who can make software is by that definition "technical". Where would you draw the border between technical and non-technical persons?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javelin_Software tried that; the people who liked it loved it, and then it crashed and burned.

Hah, most programmers can't make maintainable software.

I see programming mostly as a mindset. Like doing algebra. You couldn't do it as an infant, because you just didn't understand the concept of using letters instead of variables.

Of course, there usually is a level of complexity that you need to get used to as well, but you can also see this as a defect of most API's, or as an inherent quality of doing anything nontrivial.

If it's all about the mindset, why is the creator of one of the Excel behemoths not a programmer? It has a concept of variables (named cells even allows Excel users to name variables), If-else statements (while important for imperative languages, not all programming languages necessarily have if-else), loops (using array functions), and functions (often using another sheet for separate scope). Why do so many want to gatekeep out Excel users who have reached that level as not being programmers? Because the IDE is a GUI, and we've all been taught (sometimes via trying to make one) that GUI programming will "never" work/catch on? Because sometimes it needs to be ported to a different language? (Done that from python to Golang as a 'real' programmer.) Because they sometimes ask for help? (Stack overflow, anybody?) Because Excel sheets don't have unit tests? (Be real - there's tons of code out there that doesn't have tests.) Because their software causes messes when it has a bug? (I'm not ashamed to admit I've written code that has bug in it; ones that managed to make it into production, even!)

I wouldn't consider someone who's new to Excel and doesn't use formulas to be a programmer. But having seen some truely bohemoth spreadsheets from finance (and being asked to port them), I'm having a hard time drawing a line between the two.

Indeed, making maintainable software is difficult.

To share your analogy: many folks have trouble with algebra. It's not that it's categorically impossible for them to do it; there could be any number of factors (bad math education, home troubles making school more difficult, etc.).

With a lot of time and dedication many of these folks could eventually get pretty good at doing algebra. I've tutored these folks before. Some of them have enough time and dedication to get better at it. But without that (and at least time is outside most of these folks' control), many of them will struggle.

So I don't think the parent comment was saying "Most people can't program in the same way a gorilla can't speak English", but instead "Most people can't program because they don't have the acquired skills to program." I would add that these folks' goal is often not programming but their original job.

Most people have their own domains and don't want to make softwares. But their jobs depend on softwares sometimes. When the software developers don't understand the domain, it's reasonable to provide a DSL for users to customize by themselves. If the programming language is as natural as the human language, DSL is just the regular language.

After all, language is for the precise and concise communication, human to human or human to machine.

> If the programming language is as natural as the human language,

In my experience, it isn't. Computers are much more pedantic and less forgiving than other people. Computers won't understand "what you meant to say".

Additionally people often have trouble communicating effectively with other people in their natural language. So a DSL being in that language doesn't necessarily guarantee the user's success in using that DSL correctly.

I think you are wrong. excel can be evil and cause immense pain and suffering https://qz.com/119578/damn-you-excel-spreadsheets-jp-morgan-...