> When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
I talk and think a lot about democratization of software development.
People I talk with who really want to program but couldn't get past coding really like the idea of visual programming environments where they don't have to deal with the compiler/interpreter.
When I talk with people who are experienced, they feel there is no advantage to programming any other way than writing code.
From my experience, we have not gone too far in improving the development of software for many many decades and Bret Victor does a good job of pointing this out. I think the way we code now, and specifically how we build out software frameworks, is flawed.
We engineer software frameworks that contain both mechanism and business "objects" when software frameworks should only contain mechanism.
Software frameworks should be coded to be used by non-coders: not by other coders.
Really, a domain agnostic visual language will be hard to develop when it is representative of how we code now.
I think this has something to do with one of Clarke's Three Laws (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws).
> When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
I talk and think a lot about democratization of software development.
People I talk with who really want to program but couldn't get past coding really like the idea of visual programming environments where they don't have to deal with the compiler/interpreter.
When I talk with people who are experienced, they feel there is no advantage to programming any other way than writing code.
From my experience, we have not gone too far in improving the development of software for many many decades and Bret Victor does a good job of pointing this out. I think the way we code now, and specifically how we build out software frameworks, is flawed.
We engineer software frameworks that contain both mechanism and business "objects" when software frameworks should only contain mechanism.
Software frameworks should be coded to be used by non-coders: not by other coders.
Really, a domain agnostic visual language will be hard to develop when it is representative of how we code now.