TW-relevant Wired article

[Ed Heil]

Lots of good stuff in this article, "'Real' Programming is an Elitist Myth"

https://www.wired.com/story/databases-coding-real-programming-myth/

This is the part that made me think of Tiddlywiki:

Code culture can be solipsistic and exhausting. Programmers fight over semicolon placement and the right way to be object-oriented or functional or whatever else will let them feel in control and smarter and more economically safe, and always I want to shout back: Code isn't enough on its own. We throw code away when it runs out its clock; we migrate data to new databases, so as not to lose one precious bit. Code is a story we tell about data.

With Tiddlywiki, people who own the data also own the code and can do with it what they want, like the non-programmer programmers mentioned in the story.

[TW Tones]

Ed,

Thanks for that, worth while article, it resonates well with my desire to democratise software, apps and the internet, through tiddlywiki especially. 

I do try and stand between the user and hard code, having intentionally not moved into Javascript, although the day is coming as I can't always wrangle a tiddlywiki coder to write solutions to my perceived solutions to user confusions, without a coder oriented solution.

Regards

Tones

[Soren Bjornstad]

I've always felt that dividing the world of computing into "coding" and "non-coding", or even "code" and "data", is limiting and maybe even weird. Code is just executable data. Computing is evolving the code and the data together (or...just the data) to do things -- which is something computers do in general, but which TiddlyWiki is particularly awesome at. Considering them separate (and enforcing the division with, e.g., code signing and proprietary software) means that users are left out of half the story.

This speaks to that lack of division:

Go ahead and tweet “HTML is real programming,” and watch programmers show up in your mentions to go, “As if.” Except when you write a web page in HTML, you are creating a data model that will be interpreted by the browser. This is what programming is.

Maybe off-topic, but all in all I'm not really a fan of how this article looks at the debate. The quote above is really a quibble over the definition of the word "programming," not some eternal truth about what programming is that professional programmers refuse to recognize because it makes them look bad. The article as a whole mischaracterizes the objections of "real coders" (at least the ones I know) to "low-code", etc...it's not that low-code tools are bad, or that they're going to put professional programmers out of a job (because there will always be some system designs that are too complicated for an inexperienced person to tackle, whatever the tools are), it's that people who don't know anything about the tools involved think some guy in Accounting can create a database in Microsoft Access that scales out to 5,000 users, and then get puzzled when IT complains about having to maintain it. At least, that's what my objection is. And I would love it if everyone "learned to code," whether that involves low-code or x86 assembly, but given that two-thirds of users can't even use prefabricated tools in moderately complex ways, the idea is absurd. That's not elitist, it's realist.

Maybe the article just wasn't long enough to treat the topic properly, but my two cents.

[springer]

Ed and all, 

I grew up in the same house with FileMaker, and listened as a kid over dinner to reflections on the challenges of building a database engine that would allow the novice user to configure both the structure and the presentation layer. I read this Wired piece (despite its sometimes uncharitable portrayal of snobby coders) as being about forging continuity. Even more credit is owed, I think, to the visionary code-meisters who do the work of ensuring that some coding neighborhoods don't function as locked-gate communities.  

(Despite being raised by someone who was a bona fide computing visionary, I linger mostly at the superficial tinkering end of the spectrum. Relative to TWGG community, I'm a sheepish non-coder; relative to my other social orbits, I'm the geek who isn't scared of wading into code.)

FileMaker and tiddlywiki, despite being born a couple decades apart, are similarly "gateway" projects (and maybe Airtable is the latest?). Of course, Filemaker was hatched as commercial software (bear in mind -- it hatched when software could only proliferate by way of 5.25" floppy drives), and TW is an open-source gift. But even Filemaker has moved toward an open-platform approach recently.

At any rate, what these continuity-building platforms make possible is this invitation: Come in through the front door, try using it as-is for a while, then peek under the hood here and there (with some scripting, filters, and GUI tweaks), and eventually find your own sweet spot of knowing what to tackle at home and what snippets/plugins/solutions to beg, borrow, or buy from the savvier folks. Yes please!

-Springer

[TW Tones]

Soren,

I think many individuals divide themselves into  "coding" and "non-coding", I don't think is is a simple "trop" of commentators" and since coding is also a profession there can be barriers to entry. As this article articulates well,  this need not be the case. TiddlyWiki is a kind of gateway drug or the red pill that non-coders can use to start this journey. As a modern sceptic and critical thinker, I am aware of a serious lack of logic and awareness in most people in understanding what they know and how to put it into "black and white code", when coding the "rubber hits the road" and if you don't have it right, it often will not work. Coding mostly forces clear and rational thinking that many people lack. If we can democratise software, we can only improve peoples ability to rationalise their worlds.

And before anyone asks, a modern sceptic would not be a "climate Change denier", because there is substantial evidence it is real. Climate Change deniers are denialists, contrarians or cynics but not sceptics. Many deniers are also suffering from the dunning-kruger effect. Don't call them sceptics, call them uninformed or fools.

Tones

[Soren Bjornstad]

Tones,

I'm not sure if I'm not understanding your post or you're not understanding my post, but I agree that "coding" and "non-coding" should not be categories. I am arguing for the complete dissolution of the idea of "coding" as a separate concept from "using" a computer. Maybe I confused matters by mixing in a critique of the article's portrayal of the anti-low-code camp.

That would seem to make Nielsen-Norman's sobering statistics about computer literacy (which I linked before) even more concerning, if the mental skills (clear and logical thinking) under the moniker "coding" are being added to the definition of using a computer. Although perhaps the absence of clear and logical thinking is also exactly what's preventing people from, say, reading email...hmm. Seems to touch everything doesn't it?

[TW Tones]

Soren,

Yes, I did not reply to you post directly, sorry if that was confusing.

You don't have to look far to see a lack of rigor in the way people "think", it is particularly exposed with false memes and political bias on the internet, professionally I see many otherwise capable business people hold totally untested or irrational positions which are exposed when one tries to implement something for them. Like other "engineering efforts" the final result must work, but untested Ideas and beliefs do not "have to work", so unless people are naturally sceptical or wise, they often have wrong ideas, I don't doubt I have some as well, despite my attempts otherwise. 

Yes, I think coding forces or demands some discipline's, that few are exposed to in other parts of life.

Tones