The problem with programming and how to fix it

Where do I think programming has stalled is in the business environment. There, as the article correctly points out, it's much harder to automate your job unless you work in an IT department.

Most business end-users do their work in Microsoft Office, and this is one area where I think the tools have stalled. Visual Basic and its object models are a painful hurdle for a smart non-programmer who is trying to get things done efficiently, or who wants to learn programming for its own sake.

There have been some attempts to wire up Excel with Python, but until Microsoft decides to bundle an easy tool with every user's MS Office, programming is going to remain an arcane art.

This is vague and insulting.

As someone who can solve a Rubik's cube and has programmed and played D&D since the version predating the "Advanced" ones, I think it's spot on!

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.

I've seen code like that. It's the exception, not the rule!

We don't dream of having to maintain complex machineries reminding us of Rubik's cubes

Really? Because I've seen lots of 20-something programmers trot out a bit of code because it's "neat" without regard to cost/benefit within the project and within the current codebase.

We consider maintainance nightmares and hard-to-understand systems as failures, not goals.

I see lots of programmers who blame the skill and intelligence of their fellows while not demonstrating self-awareness by examining how everyone's participation in the system creates the mess in an emergent fashion -- then go on to fail to solve it.

We don't love complexity, we hate it (but the less experienced of us haven't got the chance to fully develop this hatred).

Plenty of the younguns just straight out fetishize complexity. Overtly. Enthusiastically!

I'm not! Thank you!

I've been pretty heads-down writing my thing, but I'll be sure to set aside my evenings to go through both sites exhaustively, and probably try to get in contact with both to ask for feedback.

> Many of us programmers spend a lot of energy to keep systems simple

"Many" is not good enough (and makes me think of the cringy and problematic #notallmen thing on twitter). Ask yourself: who introduces the complexity to those systems again?

Yes, that's the whole point.

«With balanced quotes you can have «embedded strings» without escapes»

The only time that doesn't work is if you want to embed a quote character as a character rather than as a string delimiter. But that is extremely rare.

There are also “different styles” of balanced quotes to choose from, so you can embed a quote character of one style inside a string delimited by a different style.

There will always be perverse situations where a backslash is needed. But you can make them much less common with balanced quotes.