On Tuesday 04 August 2009 03:50:12 pm Tom M. wrote:
Programmers aren’t usually
the sort of people who need desperate amounts of hand-holding in order
to get by. We don’t need it when we are reading our e-mail and we sure
as fuck don’t need it when we are programming.
While true, this also misses the point of the various visual interfaces.
Let me put it this way – most of the time, I can do things faster and
better
from an irb shell than I can from a spreadsheet. I say “better” because
I get
to actually give my variables names, rather than having to remember
the
address of a cell, and I can let my arrays grow as big as they want, and
insert things in between them, without worrying about them running into
each
other, etc.
Maybe I just suck at spreadsheets, but the act of making that particular
kind
of program visual removes a lot of power.
On the other hand, people who are not programmers can learn to do a
spreadsheet – which is, after all, a kind of program. (I’m not sure
whether
it’s Turing-complete, but that’s hardly the point here.)
So, the point of the various efforts at “visual programming” was to make
programming simple enough for ordinary people to learn to do it – the
kind of
people who do need desperate amounts of hand-holding, but are actually
reasonably intelligent, on the whole.
And like spreadsheets, I think that’s a disaster waiting to happen.
Granted, spreadsheets are well and good, when used appropriately –
though I
would still argue that there isn’t a use for a spreadsheet that wouldn’t
be
better served by a custom program. But the real disaster is when
spreadsheets
are used for more than what’s appropriate – when an entire business
bases
major decisions on the result of a flawed spreadsheet calculation, or
when some
“database” consists of a number of spreadsheets emailed back and forth,
or
worse, accessed on a shared network drive… actually, I’m not sure
which is
worse.
Like spreadsheets, a visual programming language could have the same
result.
You can see some of that with Visual Basic, though it isn’t truly
“visual” in
the sense being discussed here, but it has an “eternal September” effect
all
its own.
