
State of the Art - Call It ‘Creating Apps for Dummies’ - asnyder
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/technology/personaltech/12pogue.html?pagewanted=2&8dpc
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kemiller
People seem to think the hard part of programming is the syntax. Remembering
your semicolons and so forth. But logic is logic. If one of these is to
succeed, it will be because it has made it easier for more people, or more
kinds of people, to add the skill of programming to their toolbox.

The essence of programming is describing a desired result in a precise and
repeatable way. People have been doing this for centuries and it's always been
difficult. Computers only seem special because for most of their history,
you've had to employ a fair bit of arcana just to get to the central logic.
But now matter how much of that you brush away, there remains a nut of
irreducible difficulty that no tool, no matter how powerful, will ever get rid
of.

A WYSIWYG Word processor certainly makes writing easier, but it can never make
you a writer.

We teach children how to write. Why don't we teach them the rudiments of
programming?

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RiderOfGiraffes
Single page:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/technology/personaltech/12...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/technology/personaltech/12pogue.html?8dpc=&_r=1&pagewanted=all)

The link given in this submission is to the second page, and the link on that
second page to the "single page" version is broken.

