A small matter of programming

What Hacker News says

1. abecedariusApr 2024
   Imagine if practically all the writing you encountered was in printed books and magazines. Talk about "personal writing", how it might change things, how to get there, would get back puzzled looks and "Even if it's possible, it's still a lot of work. I just don't see that as the typical consumer behavior." It is a lot of work to produce a book.

   Some relevant background: Bonnie Nardi, A Small Matter of Programming.

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2. skmurphySep 2020
   I was verifying the Alan Kay quote: “Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible” and came across a Quora answer by him that provides a lot of useful context. See https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-story-behind-Alan-Kay-s-ad... Here are two excerpts

   "I think I came up with this slogan at Parc during discussions wrt children, end-users, user-interfaces, and programming languages. Chuck Thacker (the genius behind the Parc hardware) also liked it and adopted it as a principle for many of his projects.

   So e.g. Smalltalk needed to work with children and end-users even more intuitively than (say) JOSS or Logo. But we also wanted to write the entire system in itself, so that those who were curious — especially later on — could “pop any hood” in the system and see a live program/object written in exactly the same terms as what the children were learning.

   Similarly, the GUI had to be easily learnable by children, but — looking ahead — it had to handle “50,000 kinds of things we hadn’t thought of done by 50,000 programmers we hadn’t met” and be as simple as possible." Alan Kay

   Neal Stephenson explores similar ideas in his "In the Beginning was the Command Line."

   "Another part of this was that we were determined to have a very easy to learn UI would also incorporate end-user programming (scripting) as a natural part of it — in other words to combine what had to be simple yet possible with the programming language with what had to be simple yet possible with the UI.

   The general zeitgeist against this idea — both back then and now. Basically: those artifacts that do simple things usually wall off next levels of complexity, and those that do complex things don’t do anything simply.

   But, given that there have been some really good examples of how to do both, it’s hard not to see most computer people as (a) not caring, or (b) being lazy or unskilled, or (c) both." Alan Kay

   Bonnie Nardi explores the value of this approach in "A Small Matter of Programming: Perspectives on End User Computing"

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3. brodoMay 2020
   This is called 'End User Development' or 'End user Programming'. There is a book called 'A Small Matter of Programming' by Bonnie Nardi on this, which is worth a read. My point of view is that everyone who wants to do something like this needs to be able of computational thinking and willing to use these tools. Most people are neither. Moreover, most complexity in software engineering today is due to market forces and legacy systems. Think about why we have Javascript. Think about COBOL systems running half of the banking world. I don't see these going away any time soon.
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4. hhas01May 2019
   Nonsense. Making a good DSL is easy. I’ve built production DSLs that users adore.

   What’s hard is finding developers who know the domain and its users in the first place. You can’t solve a problem if you don’t understand the problem space. And most devs don’t understand shit except how to turn it off and on again, nor are they willing to learn. So if your average professional university-educated programmer can’t even get a simple turnkey CRUD app right, what chance of them delivering a tool that successfully hands those keys to its users?

   ..

   Go read the “Collaborative Work Practices” chapter of “A Small Matter of Programming: Perspectives on End User Computing” by Bonnie A Nardie that describes how basic users, expert users, and trained developers can develop their own software tools together, where each layer supports and educates the layers above and below it.

   And then count the number of programmers you know who’d embrace working like that. Sadly I doubt you’ll run out of fingers.

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5. rhelmerDec 2017
   This post suddenly reminded me of Resolver Systems, who made a Python/.Net spreadsheet back in the '00s:

   http://www.prweb.com/releases/spreadsheet/competition/prweb1...

   I thought it was a good idea at the time, especially after having read "A Small Matter of Programming" which makes the case that spreadsheets are one of the very few successful end-user programming systems (the other being CAD):

   https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/small-matter-programming

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6. frabcusApr 2014
   "A Small Matter of Programming" by Bonnie Nardi is an excellent book which delves into the history of end-user programming. Spreadsheets, CAD and so on, all based on researching users.
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