Pontifications

Read the whole thing from the Computing Education Research Blog:Task-specific programming languages: People aren’t dumb. Programming is hard.: “People aren’t dumb. Programming languages are hard. If we can fix that, we should. That’s what I see task-specific programming as being about.”
I think we’ve tried this before but it’s time to try again. And learn from Matlab, R, Logo, Hypercard, spreadsheets etc
Anybody should be able to express what they want and create a crude software tool to do it and then hand it off to others for refinement and user experience improvement if need be. I bet more than 50% of the time the crude software tool created by normal folks would be super useful at least as a working prototype.
Via Knowing and Doing::Eugene Wallingford::Encountering an Old Idea Three Times in Ten Days which has this great quote: “There was a need for a keyboard thirty years before anyone designed a standard typing interface, so telegraphers adapted an existing tool to fit their needs. What if we are in that same thirty-year gap in the design of programming languages? “