These are much harder for non-programmers to use than Access. With Access, almost completely non-technical people can set up their own database and make the queries they need to answer their own questions. With Postgres accessed from a general-purpose programming language, non-technical people need to hire someone to help them with every basic task.
As far as I can tell Access has nothing to do with making websites, so it’s unclear what Django or Rails has to do with anything.
> As far as I can tell Access has nothing to do with making websites, so it’s unclear what Django or Rails has to do with anything.
You can make apps with Django and Rails. They're not just "websites". Web apps are also still useful even when they're not public facing.
> These are much harder for non-programmers to use than Access. With Access, almost completely non-technical people can set up their own database and make the queries they need to answer their own questions.
That's the thing. Access and FileMaker aren't typically run by non-technical people. Yes, they aren't initially programmers, but they're usually technical people. FileMaker & Access users, whether they realize it or not, become programmers. I feel that you're confusing Access & FileMaker users with users of Excel.
> With Postgres accessed from a general-purpose programming language, non-technical people need to hire someone to help them with every basic task.
A relational database is not a big leap from either Access or FileMaker.
I know all of this because I used to work closely with a team of these people, and at some points I've even helped maintain their code.
> For example, my anthropologist parents used Access for analyzing their manually gathered census data for a small rural village.
That's surprising. Most of the time, this is what Excel & Wordpress are used for by non-techies, since both FileMaker and Access feel daunting to most of them. Maybe this is exclusive to museums? This is anecdotal, but I've worked in a lot of different industries, and in all of them everyone maintaining FileMaker or Access were also knowledgeable enough to code in those platforms ie. they were techies before they started using FM or Access
These are much harder for non-programmers to use than Access. With Access, almost completely non-technical people can set up their own database and make the queries they need to answer their own questions. With Postgres accessed from a general-purpose programming language, non-technical people need to hire someone to help them with every basic task.
As far as I can tell Access has nothing to do with making websites, so it’s unclear what Django or Rails has to do with anything.