We should work for end-users disenfranchised by lack of programming expertise. We should concentrate on their modest but ubiquitous needs rather than the high-end specialized problems addressed by most R&D.
The single biggest win for end-users "disenfranchised by lack of programming expertise" in the past 20 years was probably PHP, because all you really needed to know was HTML plus a tiny smidgen of CSS, PHP and SQL. Anything else could be cobbled together with help from StackOverflow. The results were a mixed blessing: A lot of people built sites to suit their needs, but a lot of those sites degenerated into pretty ugly hairballs. Before that, the biggest win was probably Excel: The world runs on useful (but often buggy) spreadsheets. I have nothing against these tools. They're important and they fill a critical need.
Now compare a tool like Python: it's simple and it scales from novices to experts. But it's mostly limited to programmers and scientists, and unlike PHP, you actually need to learn some basic programming to use it in most cases.
I like using tools designed for professional programmers. It's great if they also work well for novices who are willing to learn a bit of programming. But the stuff I build is a lot bigger than the typical amateur PHP website, and I need tools for managing large amounts of complexity in my problem domain, and for managing requirements that will change significantly over the course of years.
We should work for end-users disenfranchised by lack of programming expertise. We should concentrate on their modest but ubiquitous needs rather than the high-end specialized problems addressed by most R&D.
The single biggest win for end-users "disenfranchised by lack of programming expertise" in the past 20 years was probably PHP, because all you really needed to know was HTML plus a tiny smidgen of CSS, PHP and SQL. Anything else could be cobbled together with help from StackOverflow. The results were a mixed blessing: A lot of people built sites to suit their needs, but a lot of those sites degenerated into pretty ugly hairballs. Before that, the biggest win was probably Excel: The world runs on useful (but often buggy) spreadsheets. I have nothing against these tools. They're important and they fill a critical need.
Now compare a tool like Python: it's simple and it scales from novices to experts. But it's mostly limited to programmers and scientists, and unlike PHP, you actually need to learn some basic programming to use it in most cases.
I like using tools designed for professional programmers. It's great if they also work well for novices who are willing to learn a bit of programming. But the stuff I build is a lot bigger than the typical amateur PHP website, and I need tools for managing large amounts of complexity in my problem domain, and for managing requirements that will change significantly over the course of years.