Yeah, decades of dragging myself over programming’s coals have made me super cynical, but I think that lots of programmers are really good at building tools and knowledge that are horribly inaccessible to anyone not already like them. And then being surprised and unhappy that no-one else appreciates what it is they do.
If the barrier to programming is raised so high that only a career programmer can do it, all that happens is we end up with lots of users—professional experts in their own problem domains, mind—who don’t understand programming, and a bunch of professional programmers who don’t understand anything else. And then those programmers complain bitterly because they don’t understand why users hate so much the systems they’ve built for them.
And yet, Seymour Papert demonstrated how to make computing open and accessible to eight year-olds, back in an age when cutting-edge HCI was a fricking Teletype! So it’s definitely an instance of PEBKAC; it’s just a matter of which chair.
If the barrier to programming is raised so high that only a career programmer can do it, all that happens is we end up with lots of users—professional experts in their own problem domains, mind—who don’t understand programming, and a bunch of professional programmers who don’t understand anything else. And then those programmers complain bitterly because they don’t understand why users hate so much the systems they’ve built for them.
And yet, Seymour Papert demonstrated how to make computing open and accessible to eight year-olds, back in an age when cutting-edge HCI was a fricking Teletype! So it’s definitely an instance of PEBKAC; it’s just a matter of which chair.