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Comment by AuthAuth | Hacker News Reader

I wish that computers were designed in a way that pushed the users to script more. Its such a powerful ability that would benefit almost every worker.

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This has often been tried. SQL, for instance, was specifically designed to feel like natural language and be useable by people with minimal technical background. But it always runs into the same problem. As you start to expand the capabilities of these scripting languages and you get into the nitty gritty reality of what programming genuinely involves, they always end up being just really verbose and awkward to use languages that are, otherwise, like any other programming language.

Even worse is the tendency for scripting languages tend to try to be robust against errors, so you end up with programs that are filled with extremely subtle nuance in things like their syntax parsing which, in many ways, makes them substantially more complex than languages with extremely strict syntactic enforcement.

Ah so you're saying we should remove error handling and let the users feel the consequences of their actions.

The users are already feeling it, but may have trouble understanding why! The reason strongly typed languages with rigid syntax are easier is because it's much more difficult to accidentally do things like check if 3 is greater than true.

Apple has always been pretty good at this. AppleScript, Automator, Shortcuts. I did all kinds of cool stuff in OSX 10.4 back before I wrote any traditional code.

Applesoft Basic

Before that was HyperCard. It was always amazing to me the types of applications that could be written with HyperCard.

In a similar way, VBA was amazing in MS Office back in the day. If you ever saw someone who was good at Visual Basic in Excel, it’s impressive the amount of work that could get done in Excel by a motivated user who would have been hesitant to call themselves a programmer.

I wrote, and sold my first piece of software in HyperCard. It was a pretty lame Choose Your Own Adventure style game, where you clicked on buttons, having read the text. 7 year old me was pretty chuffed, to buy some baseball cards out of his hobby. I really, really miss that world.

Workers are over specialized. And our business domain models are rigid. We want to streamline and standardize which often means that code is written in few places.

It would be nice if we could have the cake and eat it here. With LLM:s there's certainly opportunities if we can find ways to allow both custom scripting and large scale domain constrained logic.

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