I wouldn't go as far as that, but yeah. Adding up a column is not the same as actually coding in Excel or even using a few math functions in a cell. And considering how many people take classes just to handle the basis spreadsheet functions, much less anything complicated, the naive accessibility of Excel can be overstated.

I've never tried to make a DSL for non-technical people because every single time I've seen a client get an expensive product aimed at their industry and designed to "not need a programmer" to customize, they end up paying to have me or a coworker to not-program customizations for them in an excruciating interface.

On the other hand, I think a lot of this side stems from insistent terminology in treating programmers like some tiny priesthood separate from the general public. That woman who can actually put together fairly complicated SQL queries? She has learned to program in SQL. That guy who put together a ramshackle VBA atrocity that gets the job done? He has learned to program in VBA.

All the mess comes from not accepting that. No DSL or templating interface or whatever will let people do programming without learning how to program to some little extent. Acceptance fails when the "public" doesn't want to give/can't spare the time and effort to do so. On the flip side, when it doesn't fail because the "public" does work to learn to program in some case, developers take that to mean that this can work in any case, so long as the public is approached properly with the right DSL/graphical environment/etc.

> designed to "not need a programmer" to customize

> they end up paying to have me or a coworker to not-program customizations

These things aren't contradictory, though. The software doesn't need a programmer to customize. They likely tested that, and proved that regular people can set it up just fine. Regular people just aren't normally motivated to do so, when it's so easy to just spend money in order to not have to learn something new.

IMHO there's a clear division that forms between people very early in life, and it can be predicted which side of the line someone falls on as early as the third grade: there are humans for whom solving puzzles that involve "wrapping their brains around" a new mental skill is a fun diversion; and there are humans for whom that same experience is aversive and something they will flinch away from. And—importantly—this has nothing to do with how good they are at doing it!

We can endlessly invent new ways to make hard things easy, but no matter how easy we make them, as long as they're at all novel or unfamiliar, the people for whom absorbing new mental models is an aversive experience will just do everything they can to avoid it. It's like people with social anxiety doing way more work of some other type to avoid socializing, but with "forming new mental connections" in place of socializing.

But the fact that a large part of the population is like this, doesn't mean that there's no value in these customizable systems. They still increase accessibility, bringing tasks that were impossible for a non-programmer into the realm of possibility! It's just that for most people, the line isn't between "possible" and "impossible"; it's between "trivial" and "not worth the trouble." The question only becomes one of possibility when you're forced into a corner of solving the problem yourself, no matter what, unable to even quit and walk away. When people are in that situation, they're thankful for these systems. But only then.