

Ask HN: how to make things easier to fix? - Tichy

Am I the only one with the feeling that things are not as "fluid" as they should be? Taking software (including web apps) for starters, why is it so hard to mend it to our personal needs?<p>As an example, I would like to have column in Thunderbird that deletes a mail, analogous to the "mark as spam" column.<p>Now I can program, so I could presumably dive into the Thunderbird source code and fix it... But it is too much effort for such a small thing. So while Open Source should in principle allow people to fix things, it is still too difficult for the most part.<p>Is there any hope ever to make such things easier? I know "programming for noobs" has been claimed by several projects, but I don't think it has ever been achieved? Even Yahoo! Pipes was too complicated for my tastes, and I haven't heard much about it anymore, either. In principle Mashups seem like potential candidate for finally fulfilling user dreams. Greasemonkey is a good candidate for web apps, but again, it is much too hard to program for noobs.<p>The only thing that came to mind thinking about it today was Excel - a lot of people who would never call themselves programmers seem to have achieved an impressive degree of Excel mastery. Is it because Excel is simple enough, or because it is enough of a standard (more people invest in Excel skills than in Thunderbird skills)?<p>Anyway, just wondering what are your thoughts about this problem (hope I made it clear enough)?
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olefoo
You've touched on a very deep topic, people have been trying to make
programming simpler and more 'intuitive' since the beginning.

And occasionally someone succeeds in making small limited improvements in
specific areas; usually by heavily constraining choices available to the
user/programmer. But widespread and general improvements are few and far
between; the rise of loosely typed scripting languages being the main one in
the last twenty years.

Programming is in some sense one of the most unnatural things a person can do;
and this is made worse by the accumulated layers of cruft of 40 years of
computer culture that both limit and enable what we can do today.

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Tichy
Following up on my own question, some thoughts:

\- in Star Trek, everybody could fix software. I could just say "Computer, add
a 'delete' column to the mail folder view". So if hard AI is possible (which I
believe), the problem is solvable. Are "simpler programming languages" all it
takes?

\- I think "graphical programming" doesn't work, or am I wrong (this used to
be the common approach, "Visual whatever++")?

\- Is it also attitude of the programs? For example Thunderbird could ship
with a small IDE that allows me to immediately dive into the code.

\- Maybe web applications should allow users to save customized JavaScript,
like an inbuilt Greasemonkey-Feature

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noodle
i've not actually taken a good hard look at this before, but i've heard good
things about iceberg:

<http://www.geticeberg.com/>

~~~
Tichy
I've watched the video, but was not convinced. I might risk a second look.

