Visual Basic was phenomenally successful as an end-user programming tool. There are entire businesses that still run off VB6. It worked because they nailed the early learning curve. It doesn't matter if your language is faster or more maintainable or less bug-ridden and insane - the majority of people will always gravitate towards the tool that is easy to get started with. This is why VB6 and PHP are so widespread.
The moral of the story is that if you want people to program in a sane and scalable way you must make it the path of least resistance. No amount of advertising or education has ever been able to overcome the fact that most people don't give a shit about programming and are just trying to get stuff done.
> if Anon the intern's problem is he doesn't know how to Google for libraries
Anon the intern's problem is that the information returned by google is incomplete and requires manual effort. I don't want to replace stackoverflow, I want to make it executable.
> I do think that the real resolution to this problem is writing simpler programs whose state is easier to track.
Well, that's where the managed state part comes in. We are trying to separate essential state which is actually part of the program logic from accidental state which is just an implementation detail (an idea expounded in http://shaffner.us/cs/papers/tarpit.pdf). That's a whole other post though.
> I'd much rather prefer being good enough a programmer to avoid the need for a debugger that can tell me why foo is not 8 despite the fact that I fucking said foo = 8 ten lines above, than being a programmer with good enough tools to help me when I'm stupid.
There is an implicit assertion here that not having a debugger makes you a smarter programmer. Would removing other feedback print statements, unit tests and the repl help too? Why even execute code at all, just print it out and think hard.
Thinking hard doesn't work if part of your mental model is wrong. Being human (unfortunately) my mental model is often wrong and a quick glance at a stack trace does more to enable correct thinking than hours of working the problem out by hand with pen and paper.
The whole point of having a computer is that it can do some of the thinking for you.
> maybe he ought to start with something other than web programming
The goal is not for Anon to learn to program, it's to build lunch_app. The web sucks but it is the only good distribution platform we have. Either we use that or we build something easier on top of it.