Example-centric programming

This Jonathan Edwards guy is brillant. His demo of Subtext is the most creative thing in programming in years. But he's basically trying to replace 50 years of programming culture: programs as text. Doomed to fail, like Charles Simonyi's Intentional programming, but may throw up interesting mashups.

End-user progamming is a dubious thing. It comes and goes as the Next Big Thing. The problem is that most people don't have the patience to write & debug software, no matter how wonderful the syntax is. Even something simple (to programmers), like control flow is a powerful and therefore dangerous notion. If you remove you drastically limit the expressiveness of the language; if you leave it in, people will stumble into the pitfalls.

End-user content, though is a killer app. My 10 year old son creates animations, web sites, and videos. A big part of video games now is the design-your-own-superhero. Choose body type, hair colour, clothes, etc. They often spend longer on it than playing the game. This isn't programming in a traditional sense. It's a type of visual programming where users assemble pre-existing components that know how to fit together. The components do the heavy lifting, while the user still feels they are "telling the computer what to do". And isn't that what programming is all about. Drag-and-drop telephony toolkits for IVRs are much the same :)