The problem with programming and how to fix it

Hah, I was nodding along with the article and then got to this bit:

> What reason is there to believe we can improve programming technology to be vastly easier and more accessible? To start with, spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are by far the most popular programming tool, used by far more people than “real” programming. Surely it must be possible to carve out other domains like that of spreadsheets without taking on the full complexity of programming.

As someone writing a spreadsheet app with magical programming powers (https://6gu.nz) no wonder the author seemed to be sweet-talking me :-).

And yeah, I think we can do a lot better. Some low-hanging fruit: backslashes in strings, "what is Unicode", "what is a hash function and why do I care?". Etc.

There's a crap-tonne of essential complexity in just about everything we do, but most tasks for which "programming" should be the right answer are not the sorts of things programmers actually do.

Part of the problem is, we have all the best tools because we are the tool makers. There isn't good version control for Excel. Linting is mediocre. And the language itself sucks, because the programmers who work on it don't think spreadsheets are programming, and don't think the people using spreadsheets are programmers.

I do think the conclusions of the article are o ff-base, though. I have no faith in professional societies, and I don't think the answer is "institutions". The answer is business -- bringing programming to the masses is worth trillions. Programming is the biggest force-multiplier that exists. It's what the FAANGs (widely disparate companies in different industries) have in common -- they (as companies) "know how to program".

Maybe businesses are short-sighted, but the value here is so big it just has to happen. Magic of capitalism and all that.

> What reason is there to believe we can improve programming technology to be vastly easier and more accessible? To start with, spreadsheets.

So many failed efforts to make programming vastly easier and more accessible have started with almost this exact line.

I think it's possible that there is a seductive trap there. We see spreadsheets and we think, “programming that doesn't have the downsides we associate with spreadsheets could be just as accessible”. But maybe the problems are intimately tied to what makes it accessible, and wheb you try to make programming that accessible you either fail or end up with something that doesn't offer any advantage over the spreadsheets we have.

> Unfortunately application programming got trampled in the internet gold rush.

No, it didn't. Oh, sure, it's not getting chased around by venture capital, but there's plenty of it going on.

> As a result the internet age has seen an exponential increase in the complexity of programming, as well as its exclusivity.

It really hasn't; we may often be solving far more complex problems, but we do it with languages, frameworks, and platforms that allow casual programmers to do so more easily than at any time in the past. Programming is “more exclusive” only in that:

(1) in working environments, IT policies restrict programming (other than spreadsheets) to the high priesthood more completely than ever before, and

(2) lots of simple problems that would be solved by casual programming in the past now have end-user tools that allow them to be solved without anything we recognize as programming.

> backslashes in strings

There's a simple solution to that: use «balanced quotes»

> Programming today is exactly what you’d expect to get by paying an isolated subculture of nerdy young men to entertain themselves for fifty years. You get a cross between Dungeons & Dragons and Rubik’s Cube, elaborated a thousand-fold.

This is vague and insulting.

Many of us programmers spend a lot of energy to keep systems simple, to a point that one could mistakenly conclude that they were easy to write.

We don't dream of having to maintain complex machineries reminding us of Rubik's cubes. We consider maintainance nightmares and hard-to-understand systems as failures, not goals. We don't love complexity, we hate it (but the less experienced of us haven't got the chance to fully develop this hatred).

i definitely agree with the points this article makes, however it’s such an unhappy tone. i would recommend whoever wrote this to stop working with other coders for a year (either work a job not involving coding or work as the sole coder somewhere) and then rewrite the article less angry.