Business/career implications aside, normalizing people thinking about computers as tools that execute arbitrary instructions is an almost purely good thing. I can't think of many other social trends that would be more beneficial for increasing general support for user agency, data interoperability, sideloading/modding, etc... we should applaud every single attempt to democratize coding and lower barriers of entry. It…
> to democratize coding Does that mean we collectively vote as to whether the next addition is a for loop? While a company may mean to make more widely accessible but used charged language, I think we should fight the urge to parrot.
A) a leveling of access (ie, that ordinary people are able to participate in the process).
B) a rejection of "snobbish"-ness about a field or its participants.
A light, non-political definition of democracy is just taking something that is restricted and making it broadly available and accessible, or changing perspectives on that thing such that normal participation in or usage of that thing isn't looked down on.
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From a "political" perspective (although probably not political in the way people think when they hear the word), democratizing code can also be thought of as an assertion that ordinary people should have agency over what their computers do. By building no-code solutions or accessible coding environments that allow ordinary people to create and share solutions to their problems, we give them the ability to compete with us about what those solutions should be.
In other words, it's not that a group of professional programmers decide what your computer can do, you can decide what your computer can do, and you can share your solutions and creations with other people on equal footing with the professionals.
There is a kind of "power to the people" mentality bundled up in concepts like Open Source and Open access to code. On one hand, these concepts don't require you to share anything, concepts like Open Source and Open access in computing allow for people to create fully private software that is entirely individual. But these concepts also allow groups of people to promote ideas about computing and about engineering in the form of working software or scripts that other people can use, and that gives those people more of a voice in conversations about what computers should and shouldn't do -- conversations that in a more locked down world would only be happening inside of companies or inside professional circles.
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I'm certainly not trying to create charged language, and I get that people might read democracy as an explicitly political Right vs Left thing. That was not my intention at all. But my feeling is that "democratizing code" is a fairly common term that I've heard a lot over the years, even leading back to my childhood -- so it didn't really occur to me that people would read it any other way.
Always happy to clarify stuff like that though; and maybe you're right. I might be out of touch with the current climate and maybe the common usage of the term has changed.