Comment by seldo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seldo | Hacker News Reader

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You are absolutely right, and that's the point of my post. Programming is too hard. We can't make all these people become programmers. But a lot of what we are doing as programmers shouldn't really require programming.

When I'm building a website for a small business, I'm not breaking any new technical ground. They need an inventory database, product news, search, an ordering and fulfillment system. At the moment, there are a bunch of systems that promise to fill that niche, but they usually still need somebody who knows HTML and CSS if they're going to customize them to any degree. Why is that? There should be WYSIWYG editors for these things. You should be able to drag-and-drop drupal modules into place in an editor, not glue them together with configs and code.

Your friend shouldn't have to know about Ruby or Rails or Agile development. The fundamentals of computer science are as relevant to building a low-traffic website as the fundamentals of chemistry are to baking a cake. Sure, you do better if you know them, but 99% of people can get by just fine by trial and error.

What the people who have CS degrees should be doing is not building websites; they should be building the WYSIWYG editors.

So what you're suggesting is we should teach these people how to administer WordPress sites?

Close, but not quite. Think of something only a little more complicated to configure than Wordpress, but far more powerful -- something that actually generates sales and provides immediate value. Software that does for other industries what Wordpress did for publishing -- one for each industry. Wordpress for restaurants, Wordpress for dentists, Wordpress for auto mechanics. And not just a website, but a full web-based system that replaces whatever crappy CRM system they're using. Software that fixes their problems, not just software that gives them a domain name.

I don't want the dentist and the mechanic to be configuring this software -- that's what I want the "blue collar programmer" to be doing, after a few weeks of training. But I want the dentist and the mechanic to use the software after it's configured.

(Also, to do much useful in Wordpress, you soon need to learn CSS and HTML, if not PHP. That's still too complicated. I want these tools to require no coding at all.)

I don't think the end result of those sorts of tools is going to go where you want it to go.

The trouble is that if it's sufficiently easy and painless that the "blue collar programmer" can do it in three hours, the guy who owns the auto shop or the restaurant who wants the website can probably figure out how to do it in twice that long and is liable to choose that over paying someone money.

Or, the smart people who are doing it today will then be able to use the new tools plus a trivial amount of code to do it in fifteen minutes instead of three hours, which won't create any new jobs, it will just make simple websites much cheaper because they can be "mass produced" by a subset of the same people who are making them now.

If you want to attack the problem of unskilled workers without somehow converting them into skilled workers, try going at it from the other end: Find ways to reduce the cost of living for those people (i.e. reduce the cost of food, housing and medical care). That better allows those people to make a living on the low wages incident to their skill level.

People always ignore that aspect of standard of living because the incentives to fix it are counter-intuitive or have strong lobbies against them. The way you make things less expensive is by reducing margins (and thus profits -- and thus tax revenue) or by increasing automation and eliminating even more unskilled jobs. But the net effect is to increase prospects for the average unskilled worker, because those with existing jobs in effect have more money in their pockets, and those with no jobs can now accept a lower paying job while achieving the same standard of living.

It already exists, and it's called Drupal. It's entire goal/purpose is to allow you to do everything through the user interface. There is a very large group of 'Drupal Developers' who build entire sites solely through the admin interface. It also has different install profiles/distributions for pre-built niches.

I used to be want the same things as you do, but it has taken me many many years to internalize the lesson that somewhere, somehow, you WILL need to write code to reach your goals. The more you try to dodge and dive around that core truth of all software, the harder the code that you will need to write ends up becoming.

It sounds like what you're describing is something like a cross between a pipe dream and what already exists.

Wordpress already exists and there are many folks, and many or most without CS degrees, who will happily develop and administer a site for you. The pipe dream comes in when you expect those sites to generate sales and provide immediate value. If every dentist in my community uses your magical Wordpress site, will sales and value magically increase for all of them?

You still need to know at least a little PHP/HTML/CSS if you want to do any substantive customization.

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