Beyond Light Table
> Imagine a world where everyone has access to computation without having to become a professional programmer - where a scientist doesn’t have to rely on the one person in the lab who knows python, where a child could come up with an idea for a game and build it in a couple of weekends, where your computer can help you organize and plan your wedding/vacation/business.<p>This seems to misunderstand fundamentally what it means to be a professional programmer. Knowing some programming language isn't it, its a mode of thinking and analysis. I think that with programming things get confused in people's minds because there is less of a clear <i>professional</i> distinction between construction and design than in physical engineering, but learning languages and syntax is the <i>trivial</i> part of programming already. Eliminating the <i>hard</i> part of the requirement to become a professional programmer is an AI complete problem, because it means you are getting the computer to do your thinking for you.<p>Many people who try to make programming better starts out with tools like IDEs or analysis tools, maybe proceeds to actual new languages, and ends up tilting at the windmill of transforming programming by replacing it with something that eliminates the need for professional programmers entirely -- and while we tend to get useful tools out of the other step, that last one is pretty consistently a place where we get vague hopes and pretty demos and, if anything of lasting use, salvaged pieces that end up as analysis, etc., tools for professional programmers.<p>I'm not saying this isn't interesting or that I don't want to see where it goes, but the description provided of both the goal and how the people promising they can deliver it have "found the way" by "studying the past and revisiting some of the foundational ideas in computing" is something I've heard from some group or another every few years for the last several decades. What I don't see is why this time is different.