As a non programmer with a PhD its a waste of my time, memory and energy that could otherwise be spent on my own domain. Its much simpler to have a 10 minute chat with a professional coder to get what I need.
Similar to the waste of time and skill development required to explain complex domain knowledge to the public. Talking instead to a professional writer makes my life much easier. I dont want to think about what tools the accountant, coder and writer use.
We can do all of those things on our own to a reasonable degree as it gives us a degree of autonomy that we wouldn't have otherwise. That's the basic level. But perhaps more importantly it has spiritual impact as it enables different perspectives and types of thinking and doing.
You’ve made a choice within your time management framework to not take on the challenge of writing software. Rather than ponder the situation if it weren’t the challenge it is today for you to accomplish what you need with a computer, you declare the mere thought of that itself to be nonsense. That is nonsensical and, frankly, quite odd coming from a researcher.
Personally, I like to code, I like to draw, I enjoy maths, music and many other things. All of those skills actually augment each other: geometry aids art, art aids programming and so forth.
I don’t agree with Bret Victor though I think design and algorithms should actually be explored with pen and paper and through other means. And I think the current way of doing things is okay like in REPLs but understanding the design and ideas outside of the computer is crucial.
It's too a comprehensive and far reaching essay for me to comment on in general, but I have a few random thoughts to share:
Right at the first example what immediately came to mind is simply having a better API. It's a boring but effective solution to say fill(color(r,g,b)). It also teaches data abstraction which is a common and powerful concept in programming (and I think it was introduced in an early chapter in SICP as well).
Secondly I think there are not enough good tools that empower non-programmers (not full-time) to program. Programming literacy (to some degree) should be more widespread and I agree with the notion that it is a way of thinking rather than just mechanical.
For example Excel is a tool that has managed to democratize programming to a high degree. When I teach designers to code websites, there are some who have had some experience with Excel, and they typically have less of a problem to understand some of the programming basics.
On the other hand Excel is also terrible, because it hides relations behind cells. The broader concept of this is also criticized in this essay.
In essence we need to find useful abstraction layers between what is main stream programming and main stream GUIs. I know many are actually doing that with varying degrees of success. But I think we need to be much more playful and drawing from history and science rather than thinking in terms of products (to sell) if we want to reach the stated goals.