The Decline of the Xerox PARC Philosophy at Apple Computers (2011)

Re:The Decline of the Xerox PARC Philosophy at Apple Compute... by jowiar on Saturday January 31, 2015 @03:09PM (#8977901)

Excel is, by far, the most successful programming-for-the-masses environment ever created. I'm not talking about VBA, either -- Just the sheet and formulas are a brilliantly accessible functional programming environment.

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Re:The Decline of the Xerox PARC Philosophy at Apple Compute... by jedharris on Saturday January 31, 2015 @03:17PM (#8977931)

Agreed (though "functional" is quite a stretch -- "dataflow" is accurate).

And how many people, given a spreadsheet, are willing to look into the formulas and tweak them?

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Re:The Decline of the Xerox PARC Philosophy at Apple Compute... by nitrogen on Saturday January 31, 2015 @03:33PM (#8977996)

And how many people, given a spreadsheet, are willing to look into the formulas and tweak them?

Enough that speadsheets probably account for a trillion dollars worth of human productivity or more since their invention (just a wild guess).

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Re:The Decline of the Xerox PARC Philosophy at Apple Compute... by jowiar on Saturday January 31, 2015 @03:33PM (#8977998)

In my experience, one or two orders of magnitude more than those who are willing to look at "code".

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Re:The Decline of the Xerox PARC Philosophy at Apple Compute... by jedharris on Saturday January 31, 2015 @03:58PM (#8978080)

Probably. Maybe the same ratio applied to Hypertalk vs "real code" -- i.e. 5% for Hypertalk, 0.5% for "real code". We never tried to find out.

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