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Let Joe Average Help You Code

Posted by Zonk on Tue Feb 28, 2006 04:10 PM
from the that's-a-lot-of-monkeys-and-a-lot-of-typewriters dept.
Programming IT Technology
ploose writes "Apache co-founder and CollabNet CTO Brian Behlendorf says that programming should be opened out to non-developers. Bring them into a development community with proper feedback forums and bad code will get flamed anyway, so it doesn't matter what they write. From the interview: 'Mashups are really Excel macros 2.0 - with the rise of Web services, the more vehicles that are out there that expose data through programmable APIs, with Office 12.0 and Firefox with AJAX, the more people you'll see create applications. The line between hardcore developers and the average Joe will start to get very fuzzy.'"
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  • Anyone remember back when every PC owner was expected to know at least a little BASIC? Back then computers were used for custom programs just about as much as they were used for shrink-wrapped applications. And if you didn't have the skills to write your processing program in BASIC, you could always hire someone to do it quickly and cheaply. (Program requirements weren't exactly high back then, so finishing a program in a day or two was quite common.) The question is, what happened to those days?

    I suppose part of it was that shrink wrapped software got better. Where as you originally might have had trouble finding the software you needed, today you can get software for just about anything! The other part of the problem was that programming became far more complex of a task. Instead of just taking data in and spitting out a report, it now has to provide a cool GOOEY interface (MMmmm... chocolate), and real-time interactivity. These types of features are not so easily grasped by the average person, and require training to master. Thus programming has been squarly placed in the hands of experts.

    If Brian Behlendorf wants non-developers to write code, he's better have another BASIC up his sleeve. (AJAX BASIC? Hmmm... I might have code like that lying around...) Because I don't think I could possibly take another round of Fourth Generation Languages [wikipedia.org].

    P.S. Excel VBA was a lousy attempt at getting non-coders to program. Don't do that to us again. Please. Make it truly home and SOHO focused like BASIC was.
    • Exactly, as first I was thinking, well MS Access is a good example of a very user friendly IDE where just about anyone can create a reasonable front end for a simple database. But then I remembered that I've tried to show several non programmers how to make a simple form or even a query, and most just don't get it.
    • Man, I would kill to get a simlple BASIC interpreter that has I/O functions that could handle NTFS. I deal with lots of data sometimes, and I don't want to write a VBasic program with a GUI so that I can run the program, then click a button to execute the code. Command line works fine for me, but I want it to be simple and fast to code. No, I don't want to fuss with declarations most of the time, and no, I dont' have time to learn a whole new langauge and mess with a compiler. I just want to write (essenti

    • I thought that was already the idea behind OSS, GNU, sourceforge, etc.

      Its open source, anybody can help, its just that much of the code of interest already has a group of developers and the codebase is so large and many times the bugs are so numerous, that even a decent coder is uninterested in fixing them.

      But, in theory Joe Average is welcome already...

  • Many of the eager and excited hacks are by beginners, I think (^_^)

    I'm still a beginner in python and I always intend to be a beginner
    in one subject or the other. Maybe someday I'll be a beginner in the
    apache project.

    But alas, if he wants to collect patches from my mom, he better get ready
    for a logic bomb.

  • darwin prize for project managers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bratboy (649043) on Tuesday February 28 2006, @04:17PM (#14820086) Homepage
    This is a fantastic way to achieve negative productivity. I know, let's put a thousand monkeys in a room with a thousand IDEs - that ought to get us some code! Most non-programmers are simply not trained to think in a rigorous way. Hell, most programmers aren't trained to think rigorously. That's why it's so hard to find good ones.
  • In the Web 2.0 world, it's appropriate of course for Johnny not only to program, but to do it collaboratively, too.

    ...none of us is as dumb as all of us!

    Joe or Josie Average can barely walk and talk on a mobile phone at the same time. If you want to make toys for them to play with and create "neato thingys" great, but keep them out of programming before it dilutes the talent pool even more. I can just see these "average" programmers being duped into creating the next generation of malware.

  • Great! Programming no longer requires thinking! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MobyDisk (75490) on Tuesday February 28 2006, @04:19PM (#14820108) Homepage
    The article links to another article, Why Johnny can't program [bricklin.com], which is really good. That article has a good concept: That what we call "programming" is actually a hierarchy with shades of gray. C++ is programming. But is writing an Excel macro programming? How about programming a VCR? What if I write requirements and then code-gen a class hierarchy or a database schema? Programming is more than just writing code.

    But the ZDNet article has the highest hype per paragraph ratio of anything I've read for a while. Web 2.0? Is that the buzzword replace Internet2? "Programming collaboratively?" And of course, AJAX & web services will make everyone a programmer. Some editor just linked a bunch of articles on similar subjects, threw in enough buzzwords, and jumped to a conclusion. Yes, everyone is now a programmer. "Sure grandma, I can set the clock on your microwave for you. I'll be right over."

  • Just out of curiosity...any developers want to comment on the efficiency of the proposed method? I mean...wouldn't that eat up a LOT of time to sort through the code and see what is useable and what isn't? And in that timeframe...wouldn't it have been quicker just to have the developer write the code himself?

  • Already fuzzy (Score:3, Interesting)

    by XMilkProject (935232) on Tuesday February 28 2006, @04:20PM (#14820117) Homepage
    Most of the developers I work with in contracting positions know less than the average Joe, even an excel macro would be stretching their abilities. Yet they all have Senior Programmer II titles or some such thing.

    It started with VB, and will continue... More and more of these non-programmers start thinking they are developers, and getting hired into positions they don't belong in.... and America's corporations are paying for it in cold hard cash and wasted time.

    Hopefully there will be a new paradigm in developer evaluation sometime in the near future, so that there will be a clear metric to determine a persons ability, and thus hire-ability.
  • ...it is with 'joe average' using only the tool he knows. For example, companies that use spreadsheets where they should be using databases. Heck, using spreadsheets with macros for 'code' even. You want joe average involved? Make him work with a DBA for the storage, but let him work on the 'interface' to that data using whatever tools he is comfortable with. That would be great because mr. average is definitely the expert in making an interface that makes his own job more efficient, but having the rig

  • big line between hardcore devs and joes (Score:4, Insightful)

    by LetterRip (30937) on Tuesday February 28 2006, @04:21PM (#14820134)
    [QUOTE]The line between hardcore developers and the average Joe will start to get very fuzzy[/QUOTE]

    Not really - the hardore devs will be far more productive and be able to implement complex programs requiring algorithmic insight, the joes will be able to to implement stuff that requires simple logic and interfaces. Of course there will be lots of useful stuff that a joe could do, it just won't be the same kinds of stuff that the hardcore dev will be doing.

    LetterRip
  • So, with 1000 open source programmes working at 1000 dummy stations, they should be able to produce Duke Nukem 3D?
  • I'm sure we all remember the Simpsons episode where his brother thinks that an "average guy" can design a better car then the "eggheads" he has working for him?

    I don't expect the results from this venture to be as good as that.

    Nuff said,

    =tkk

  • Fantasy. (Score:3, Funny)

    by torokun (148213) on Tuesday February 28 2006, @04:23PM (#14820157) Homepage
    99% of users don't even want to open the help. This guy's smoking some collaborative utopia crack.

  • Every five years or so (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cdrguru (88047) on Tuesday February 28 2006, @04:25PM (#14820193) Homepage
    It is announced that the role of the "programmer" has ended. Either the new stuff is just so simple that anyone can do it without any training at all, or the machine will program itself as it learns what you want to do.

    This has been going on since the beginning of 4th generation langauges, which came about in the late 1970's. There were actually some reasonable achievements which have been utterly lost now. But nothing that would replace programming completely.

    While there is lots of benefits to including users into a project to make sure it remains useful and usable, this doesn't mean trying to help non-programmers join in the programming effort. It isn't the programming training they lack, it is the programming orientation towards thinking about the problem they lack.
  • The line between hardcore developers and the average Joe will start to get very fuzzy.'"

    No, it most certainly will not get fuzzy.

    Billy G has tried for years to get the average office worker capable of making their own macros, then blobs of VB script, now inline .NET snippets - Much to the dismay of those of us who need to make everything magically better when an "average Joe" actually tries using some of these features and blows away the entire 2005 regional accounts receivable ledger.

    Like it or not,
  • Anyone who has done serious development knows that this is nonsense. Large software projects depend critically on skilled developers to provide a sound overall design - you can't just throw more people at the problem. The book "The mythical man month" argues this point quite convincingly.

  • Just like Microsoft Access! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PIPBoy3000 (619296) on Tuesday February 28 2006, @04:27PM (#14820218)
    Our organization currently has a headache when non-developers make an Access database, get their department relying on it, and then leaving the organization. When things break, the developers get sucked into having to maintain this monstrosity.

    We're trying hard to disavow them completely, but it's hard to say no when the customer insists its part of a vital healthcare function. For those, we've sometimes rewritten them using a real SQL back-end, web browser client, and code we can support and maintain.

    Making tools to let non-developers do things isn't necessarily bad, it's just that there has to be clear expectations as to support. Writing web applications isn't the same as typing up a Word document or making an Excel spreadsheet with a couple macros. It's easy for non-developers to quickly get in over their heads.
  • Maybe we should let Joe Average try his hand at other things, too, like air traffic control or surgery. Hell, we already let him pretend to be president.

  • Every managers dream (Score:3, Insightful)

    by br00tus (528477) on Tuesday February 28 2006, @05:51PM (#14821211)
    I have worked at Fortune 100 IT departments before, and it's obvious that the dream of the senior managers is to see if they can dumb down everything to where anyone off the street could do the job just as easily as they could carry boxes or push a mop. They have been trying to do this for a long time, and for the most part it does not work. There are some tasks which are simple and repetitive that can be pushed down to a lower level, and that would be the realm being talked of - mashing, macros and all of that. But most work you need someone who knows what they're doing. It is easy to write 200 lines of spaghetti code that perform an application, but once you get to 2000 lines, never mind 20,000 lines, you need to know what you are doing. You need, at the very least, the kind of programming practices mentioned in Code Complete.

    Behlendorf is a smart guy, and who knows what spin the reporter put on his comments. I'm sure Behlendorf is happy to see mashups and people getting into programming with a more simple programming language then, say, assembly. But this concept in the mind of a pointy-headed boss can lead to unpleasantness. I worked as a sysadmin once in a level 2 environment where they were trying to or thought they had made an idiot-proof wrapper around everything for us, but the idiot-proof wrapper itself had problems, so we not only had to deal with broken systems, but with the broken idiot-proofing they had tried to wrap around the systems.

    SQL was designed originally so that even non-technical managers could use it. I have worked with SQL for many years, and still have to look for examples on Google whenever I need to do a LEFT JOIN or something like that. The concept of "anyone can program" can be dangerous in the wrong hands.

  • Seriously, leave programming to programmers (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Kjella (173770) on Wednesday March 01 2006, @07:47AM (#14825380) Homepage
    What I would really like is another layer That would take fuzzy specs, let me take an example quote:

    "Give the salesmen the opportunity to plan their visits and handling of their district/area of responsibility."

    To beat that into a real detailed spec of WHICH inputs should the salesmen give, WHAT views should they see and HOW they should be able to plan. I don't mean as actual code, but I mean down to the level of layout, fields, options, formats, formulas, filtering options (browsing, drop-down, freetext, radio-buttons, checkboxes), default filters, grouping, flags, stoplights, escalation, reports and so on.

    Project managers don't seem up to that job, a lot of that is minute detail and not really manager-level anyway. But if someone could do that job and give me a proper spec, the actual coding would go a lot quicker. In my experience half the time is either spent a) beating it out of the customer or b) the customer coming back saying "that's not how we want it to work".

    That should be exactly what these types of programmers are good for - they understand basic UI concepts but don't know how to build a proper back-end. If they could work that out in detail (if you have some good UI tools perhaps design the UI itself, but not one line of code), then you'd free up lots of programmer time that actually know how to program.

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