there's a lot of research and activity going on ar...
# of-end-user-programmingc
crabl
10/07/2019, 5:36 PMthere's a lot of research and activity going on around programming environments for users who have never been exposed to software development before (Scratch, Logo, etc.) but are there any good environments out there for people who are motivated enough to start building software on their own to solve problems (people who, given the time, would absolutely put in the effort to learn a programming language, but who haven't invested the time yet)? i'm thinking about those users who are "just dangerous enough" with a computer to know that they can use it as a higher-level tool than just a word processor or internet browser. i'm thinking of something like a scripting language (applescript?) or environment (ios shortcuts/automator, i guess excel can be included here too). is this niche under-served? are the tools not powerful enough? not easy enough to understand? riddled with incidental complexity? is the resulting software not easy enough to share?
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Ilari Kajaste
10/07/2019, 5:44 PMWe're trying to hit that exact group with ValOS, but we currently severely lack system documentation, streamlined publishing, project management related tools and optimization. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ilari Kajaste
10/07/2019, 5:50 PMI would say a major problem in general is incidental complexity. When you want to actually make something working, you are quickly faced all sorts of issues with coding IDEs, database setups, server environment configurations, etc. They don't really have much at all to do with "how my program does things", but rather they are "how do I set up an environment where my program can actually work in", which isn't all that interesting to someone who wants to create Their Thing. I believe that to be a major obstacle for the group you mention.
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Ivan Reese
10/07/2019, 5:55 PM
@crabl I'd say Max/MSP and Pure Data directly target that "dangerous enough" kind of computer power user.
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Tudor Girba
10/07/2019, 6:04 PM@Ilari Kajaste Do you have a link to ValOS?
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crabl
10/07/2019, 6:07 PMright, i had almost forgotten about Max and PD! i guess there are tools like LiveCode as well, but i hesitate to think of that as a humane medium of software creation. hypercard is probably the closest thing that exists to what i have in my mind, but the big trouble with it was lack of integration into the underlying OS. what valaa is doing is very interesting to me, and i can appreciate why it is cloud-based, it’s just so tempting to want to use the capabilities of the OS running on my machine rather than someone else’s
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Ilari Kajaste
10/07/2019, 6:36 PM@Tudor Girba Well, as said we don't have any good documentation yet. https://valaa.com is our site, and our very poor state of current documentation is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o1-Py30ATqcExhASpnQal8sSZpVDmm_x0G8O6pnmlJc and in github https://github.com/valaatech/kernel
Ilari Kajaste
10/07/2019, 6:38 PMWe have a better documentation in the works with a whole new documentation system, but it's still unpublished.
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Dan Cook
10/07/2019, 6:59 PMCheck out this perspective (scroll down to the "Simplicity" section):
http://ngnghm.github.io/blog/2015/08/02/chapter-1-the-way-houyhnhnms-compute/
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Garth Goldwater
10/08/2019, 9:00 PMlove this blog! never seen it before
Garth Goldwater
10/08/2019, 9:02 PM@Ilari Kajaste i hope you post that documentation to #CCL5VVBAN when you’re looking for some eyeballs on it!
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Ilari Kajaste
10/09/2019, 6:45 AMWe'll gladly do that once we're at that point!
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Greg Jarmiolowski
11/21/2019, 3:36 PMThe thought I am noodling around this is that you have some way of expressing programs at various levels of abstraction. So as I gain experience and knowledge I start to dig into the lower levels. Maybe this starts with something like boxes and arrows or cells in a spreadsheet but then I can dig deeper, eventually getting to the details of how a sort algorithm works, for example.