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Comment by seabird | Hacker News Reader

People just don't care and won't do it if it requires more than a fleeting thought to get it done. Excel is comically powerful and only a tiny fraction of users have any interest in tapping into that. Every step of the way, for the last 50 years, pretty much all parties involved have actively worked to move away from end-user programming.

Words can't describe how happy I would be if that wasn't the case, but it's better to walk than curse the road. Changing this would require pretty much everybody on the planet to re-evaluate how they interact with a computer, and I'm not holding out on that.

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I think the point is that, rather than "requiring everybody on the planet to reevaluate how they interact with a computer", Maggie's idea is that computers should be reevaluated with regard to how they interact with people. Like another person earlier in these comments, I am much more skeptical than her that LLMs are "the answer" to enabling non-professional-programmers to create -- more importantly to modify and compose -- chunks of deeply custom software, but in principle I'm in sympathy with the sentiment. People do care. It's just that almost all software they interact with is deeply brittle, change hostile, black-box. You can change almost nothing about it beyond some superficial tweaks, and composing different pieces of software into a working "something else" is mostly impossible. I suspect that the very notion of an "app" is something we have to get past in order to make progress on this...

People love the very notion of an app. Computers went from something every user was expected to program to some extent to that brittle black box because users didn't want to program, they just want the benefits of software spoonfed to them. "We" evaluated the world where the computer was beholden to the non-programmer users ("our AS/400 administrator is some guy from supply chain, I put his data in an Access database for our team to process"), and then Apple made a gazillion dollars with "apps" because your average user thinks that shit is for dorks and a waste of their time. You would be floored at how many young people don't even own a computer beyond their phone because they see so little benefit to something they have control over. It is very much a values issue in the population at large.

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