kitd 3 days ago

> I'm eagerly waiting for the thing that's easy enough for non-coders to use that doesn't make the code-capable maintainers want to cry mercy.

As a former VBasic dev, don't hold your breath!

1
mst 3 days ago

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

I have seen far too much VB and VBA that was written by people who were only *ish* code-capable.

BUT.

The thing is, the result did basically work, was extremely useful to the people who were using it, and if the 'ish' person hadn't written it wouldn't've existed at all.

So I'm genuinely glad that they did write it, and they were pretty much invariably somebody who was self taught, doing their best, in isolation, with nobody around them who even rose to the level of 'ish' to bounce ideas off or give feedback.

It's actually quite a fascinating challenge to refactor code like that such that it becomes more structurally coherent *and* is still understandable and modifyable by the original author (ideally easier to modify, but I will settle for not making their lives harder while also making it easier for somebody like me to debug weird shit problems for them when they ask me to pitch in).

So my 'aaaaaaa' here is in a spirit of 'where did I put the tissue box, my eyes are bleeding again' but not at all in a spirit of criticising the original author. They made it work at all!

But any thought on trying to make it possible for people who don't code at all to produce non 'aaaaaaaa' inducing results needs to account for the part where we can't even manage that for the 'ish' people, and thus I am very suspicious of the odds of it ever working out.