> Will end-user applications ever be truly programmable? If so, how? Emacs, Smalltalk, Genera, and VBA embody a vision of malleable end-user computing: if the application doesn't do what you want, it's easy to tweak or augment it to suit your purposes... With Visual Basic, you can readily write...
Lisp was great and VBA was fun back in the days and I love it nostalgically but today VBA looks ridiculous because it actually is neither functional nor an object-oriented but a toy language and the fossil VBA IDE kept integrated in all the modern MS Office apps without an improvement for decades feels like a disaster. It ought to be replaced by either a modern dialect of Lisp (which is improbable as Lisp looks ugly and feels unintuitive to non-geeks and geeks are not the relevant target audience of Excel macros functionality) or something like Python (the best candidate that can probably satisfy everybody).
> Today, however, end-user software increasingly operates behind bulletproof glass. This is especially true in the growth areas: mobile
I believe the main reason here is the cost of supporting (and developing too) the apps and forcing users to do what you want. It's easier when you know all the possible use cases in detail and you are who designs them.
> and web apps.
Web apps don't operate behind bulletproof glass. Thanks g-d we still can view source, inspect, change and script almost everything in the web with the developer tools integrated in every major browser.
Lisp was great and VBA was fun back in the days and I love it nostalgically but today VBA looks ridiculous because it actually is neither functional nor an object-oriented but a toy language and the fossil VBA IDE kept integrated in all the modern MS Office apps without an improvement for decades feels like a disaster. It ought to be replaced by either a modern dialect of Lisp (which is improbable as Lisp looks ugly and feels unintuitive to non-geeks and geeks are not the relevant target audience of Excel macros functionality) or something like Python (the best candidate that can probably satisfy everybody).
> Today, however, end-user software increasingly operates behind bulletproof glass. This is especially true in the growth areas: mobile
I believe the main reason here is the cost of supporting (and developing too) the apps and forcing users to do what you want. It's easier when you know all the possible use cases in detail and you are who designs them.
> and web apps.
Web apps don't operate behind bulletproof glass. Thanks g-d we still can view source, inspect, change and script almost everything in the web with the developer tools integrated in every major browser.