Program your computer (addendum)

It's great to hear that my last post resonated [1] with a few other

people. Maybe there's hope yet! :)

Before the dust settles, I want to add a few clarifying

remarks. Reading through my post now I realise that I never explicitly

defined what I meant by "program". This word is usually taken to mean

writing code in some text editor, IDE or what have you, in some

programming language or other. With this narrow interpretation in

mind, the post might come off sounding a bit gatekeepy.

This is emphatically not what I mean.

Instead, by "programming" I mean any activity which allows the user to

combine primitive operations and create their own abstractions of

those combinations. From this point of view, programming can take a

plethora of different forms that look very different to what we think

of as big-P "Programming", and there's no reason these forms need to

be complicated.

Once upon a time there were lots of efforts in this direction. Think

LOGO with its turtle, and a lot of Alan Kay's work: live-programmable

Smalltalk desktops, and the Dynabook concept. Why did we stop?

In my opinion, designing fully programmable environments which are

truly accessible for the majority of users needs to be a much bigger

priority than it currently is. Only in this way can we hope to narrow

the wholly artificial gap between programmers and non-programmers.

Users should be more than consumers.

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[1] gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/s/programming/4784