zlacker

This makes me wonder what someone with less computer experience would do, ie if you're not a former computer professional.

Sure, open source makes everything rather accessible from a monetary point of view, but you still have to learn things. I almost feel like in the past there were more attempts at making this accessible to the end user, HyperCard, dbase etc, even just BASIC on your 8-bit machine.

Nowadays? Excel/Google Sheets for the most simple case, probably, but if you have to transfer data from/into there or present it differently? Web sites and GUIs aren't that easy, but it's what the users know.

If your point of interaction with a computer is more bare-bones (eg a BASIC/DOS prompt), solutions feel closer, easier to grasp.

>>mhd+(OP)

    > This makes me wonder what someone with less computer experience would do, ie if you're not a former computer professional.

One would simply make bread the same way as it has been done for 1000 years!

Humans can understand ratios, write stuff down, plan for the future, etc all without org-mode in emacs, databases, and sometimes without even a calculator.

>>mhd+(OP)
There's a fair amount of low code type web application makers. Google's AppMaker, Quickbase, Zoho Creator, Knack, Airtable, etc.

No real comparable open source equivalent for these types of things yet.

>>mhd+(OP)
Can't remember where I read the story, Steve Yegge perhaps. But they were talking about how where they worked secretaries actually used Emacs apps developed by the IT department and, over time, the secretaries started to extend the apps with Elisp.

>>mhd+(OP)
Google Sheets with Google Forms (or whatever it may be called) for some users. Or, without internet, Excel.

The spreadsheet is sort of one of those insane breakthroughs where it really makes programming (functional at that) really easy to grasp. And you can iteratively and intuitively add hundreds of variables and logic gates.

>>mhd+(OP)
> I almost feel like in the past there were more attempts at making this accessible to the end user, HyperCard, dbase etc, even just BASIC on your 8-bit machine.

Oh for sure, look at web: we transformed something simple and beautiful like html+css in a complete shit show.

Also, I don't feel like the new programming languages are easier then COBOL or BASIC, quite the contrary. We are making technology more complicated for no reason.

Or at least, at the time we had the very complicated stuff and stuff that simplified complexity. Think about S and SPSS.

Now we have complicated and very complicated. We are giving less creative possibilities to the end user: making them consumers, first of all.

Other example VB6.

>>0x4454+95
Millions of people used WP5, with its cryptic codes and huge keyboard overlays. I don’t believe that’s any easier than Emacs (or HTML). People can figure things out, when they have to.

>>kome+c6
I still miss VB6. It was a beautiful tool and easy to make GUIs with. I still can’t handle writing native GUIs without a good WYSIWYG editor. Delphi was cool, but Object Pascal?! Many people still swear by Delphi and it’s because when your code is UI focused Delphi makes that super easy.

>>0x4454+95
That's from Richard Stallman. “Multics Emacs proved to be a great success — programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program.”

https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html

>>0x4454+95
Its from RMS, not Steve Yegge: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html

It was Bernie Greenberg, who discovered that it was (2). He wrote a version of Emacs in Multics MacLisp, and he wrote his commands in MacLisp in a straightforward fashion. The editor itself was written entirely in Lisp. Multics Emacs proved to be a great success — programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program.

>>tyingq+C4
i'm not a programmer and i was able to string together an SMS RSVP system for my floor hockey league with zapier, google sheets and twilio.

>>kome+c6
IMO it's more a product of people expecting more from software. It's no longer enough to have something that works; it has to work and be pretty and user friendly.

>>0x4454+95
Steve Yegge told this story:

> Mailman was the Customer Service customer-email processing application for ... four, five years? A long time, anyway. It was written in Emacs. Everyone loved it.

> People still love it. To this very day, I still have to listen to long stories from our non-technical folks about how much they miss Mailman. I'm not shitting you. Last Christmas I was at an Amazon party, some party I have no idea how I got invited to, filled with business people, all of them much prettier and more charming than me and the folks I work with here in the Furnace, the Boiler Room of Amazon. Four young women found out I was in Customer Service, cornered me, and talked for fifteen minutes about how much they missed Mailman and Emacs, and how Arizona (the JSP replacement we'd spent years developing) still just wasn't doing it for them.

https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel

>>projec+n5
> Google Sheets with Google Forms (or whatever it may be called) for some users.

That was my reaction too. I have a google sheet for bread that allows for different batch sizes and displays out baking instructions in english. This is what a cell looks like: ="mix "&D3*B$1&" grams of "&C3

I can look at the sheet on my phone when making bread. Sheets also now caches off line.

>>mhd+(OP)
I know a lot of financial analysts who don’t know how to “program” but develop incredibly complicated Turing complete excel models regularly. Excel is a very flexible tool and can be leveraged to great effect.

>>mruts+rf
I know for a fact that up until around 2006 the official US Treasury curve for one of the big financial reporting firms was created/maintained on an Excel spreadsheet that was one step away from becoming sentient and asking us if we wanted to go get high.

>>ken+I8
Cryptic, yes, but discoverable! Recently I was trying to help someone fix their bizarrely broken Word document, and I would have given my right arm for "F5 Reveal Codes."

>>0x4454+95
Tech people have a problem with assuming that everyone is an idiot, mostly because it’s easier to do half-assed work aimed at a moron.

Legacy text based solutions that survived are usually much better designed by people who actually spoke to the users.

>>bitexp+K8
Object Pascal vs Visual Basic? That's not even a competition, Object Pascal, of course. At least it was somewhat internally consistent.

>>mikema+ha
I would be interested in a write-up of that.

>>crispy+N2
Yup. Bakeries have been run using a pen and paper daybook and the master baker’s skill for centuries. But the calculations are still a pain in the arse, so automating that is a big win. The Bread Matters spreadsheet I based the database schema on was made by someone who was a baker, not a programmer, and for a fixed set of recipes, it’s brilliant. If I hadn’t known the rudiments of RDBMS design I’d have bitten the bullet, extended the sheet and grumbled every time I had to add a new formula.

>>maire+se
Yup. The spreadsheet is an amazing innovation, I just find all the repetition when adding something that should just be data to be monumentally frustrating. And I have no idea how to make a sheet that copes with orders for Friday and Saturday when a when each batch takes three calendar days. I suppose making a new copy of the basic sheet for each batch would do the job.

>>pault+3b
I wonder who does that. All my experience with non-tech people tells me that they don't expect anything from software, just accept how it is, but they do get annoyed if it doesn't let them do their jobs quickly. Designing for the needs of normal people seems to go in the exact opposite direction to the current UX trends. When UX trends lead to slow, thin, shiny applications, users would be happier with dense and fast applications which minimize time spent in them.

>>vetina+Dw
Agree. It was mostly nostalgia. That is just what I learned on. Object pascal was (is) a real language at least

>>bachme+dc
Ever since reading that essay years ago I’ve been perennially curious about Mailman. Would be really cool to see a screencast or even just some screenshots of what the UX was like.

>>mhd+(OP)
There's a decent size (albeit a little bit - but only a little bit - specialist) wholesaler in sydney. The boss is a tech enthusiastic, and the whole thing is somewhat glued together with various bits of perl and other stuff.

>>gmfawc+yg
Emacs is quite discoverable, too. Spacemacs even more, I think.

>>mkespe+991
Yup. It's called a "self-documenting editor" for a reason :). From built-in help on every command, function, variable and keybinding, through apropos and tutorial, through a full-length manual - all available off-line, in the editor - it's easy to get your bearings around using and customizing Emacs. That is, once you adopt the old-school, pre-web notion of software actually having documentation.

>>Spooky+rh
The thing that has irritated me often is not that people are idiots but they often lack of self belief that they could learn to do something. The key here is the secretaries didn’t realise they were learning to code, but if you told them to learn to code they would most likely make excuses.

>>Swalde+Vh1
Of course.

You pay your admin $18/hr and pay a programmer $50. People tend to assume their place.

>>Spooky+rh
We bought a new iSeries mainly because the accounting staff said, point blank, the GUI on the replacement system was total crap. The green screen is efficient and they can get everything done quickly without moving a hand off the keyboard.

>>crispy+N2
Down the street from me is a baker so good he doesn't even have any signage, you have to know it's there -- the line out the door at certain times might be a hint -- and as far as I can tell, other than punching in the prices in the minimum cash register required by law, they keep no records at the point of sale.

I don't know if he keeps spreadsheets or even databases elsewhere -- I hope he does, as he's an amazing baker and works his butt off, and I hope he makes tons of money. But I really don't think he has any record of, say, whether Rye or Spelt sells out faster. (It all sells out every day.)

So I wonder if there's some level of artistry where optimization might just be an annoying distraction.

>>protom+nn1
Exactly. Go to any retailer with these green screen Point of Sale systems and watch them wiz around the keyboard.

>>gmfawc+yg
It's right there in the toolbar, the "P"-ish looking icon.

>>roel_v+9G1
You mean the paragraph mark, "¶"? The Show All feature in Word will highlight whitespace, tabs, newlines, which is helpful. But in WordPerfect, Reveal Codes would show much more than that: style changes, image and table introductions, etc. It was much more like looking at the HTML source of a Web page in a Web Developer tool -- not only could you see the tags, but you could modify and remove them easily and precisely.

>>0x4454+95
I wonder if people also get better at math if they don't notice it's math.