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 <https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/>, 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. On Friday, December 4, 2020 at 4:48:50 PM UTC-6 Ed Heil wrote: > 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. > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/8415cb9a-5c2e-414c-abbe-993ae4fdac61n%40googlegroups.com.
