End-user programming is a time-honoured discipline but end-user tools such as spreadsheets are held in contempt by specialised developers. The discipline actively works to raise barriers of abstraction and tooling to ensure that it is only accessible by specialists and what investment is made in end-user tools is done under the assumption, like Gabriel’s, that the gulf between those empowered to build software and those empowered to use it will stay unbridgeable. A “macho intellectual culture” ensures that if a tool or process can’t be understood, it is the developer’s challenge to understand it rather than the producer’s challenge to make it comprehensible.
Jonathan Edwards wrote an exciting blog posting in 2013 under the guise of a Leaked transcript of censored Bret Victor talk and remarks on this tendency:
a great way to make programming as hard as possible is to make it more like mathematics
A recent Ink and Switch article on end user programming rightly concludes that it remains “largely a dream”.