Szymon Kaliski

End-User Programming vs Programming

• one take at this is programming as a profession vs end-user programming as moldability of existing systems, with this lens:
  • not everyone should be able to make a living from programming, but:
  • everyone should be able to nudge their tools into the right direction if needed though
• another take at this is programming as a profession vs programming as a tool for understanding dynamic systems (Simulators, Understanding Through Building), with this lens:
  • again, not everyone has to be a professional software engineer, but:
  • there are people who would benefit from being able to build dynamic systems to learn, understand, and act on them - programming here is a dynamic-modeling tool
• another take is programming as a profession vs programming as a tool to achieve some other professional goal (or "I like to play with computers" vs "I have a job to do and a computer could help me")
  • a "Citizen Developer" is an interesting take at this:

    A citizen developer is an employee who creates application capabilities for consumption by themselves or others, (...) All citizen developers are business technologists. However, all business technologists are not necessarily citizen developers.

    — https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/citizen-developer

• related to: Bicycle for the Mind, Programming Tools and People's Needs

If programming means writing step-by-step recipes as has been done for the past 40 years, however, then for most people it never was relevant and is surely obsolete. Spreadsheets (...) give strong hints that much more powerful styles are in the offing for novices and experts alike. Does this mean that what might be called a driver-education approach to computer literacy is all most people will ever need-that one need only learn how to "drive" applications programs and need never learn to program? Certainly not. Users must be able to tailor a system to their wants. Anything less would be as absurd as requiring essays to be formed out of paragraphs that have already been written

— Computer Software - Alan Kay

Backlinks

1. 2022-01-03A Dog, Short Ramble on "Programming", MIDI→CV, and a Rabbit-Holing Web Browser¹
2. 2021-07-09End-User Programming¹
3. 2021-07-09Domain Experts Shouldn't be Limited by Developer Time¹