Ed and all, I grew up in the same house with FileMaker, and listened as a kid over dinner to reflections on the challenges of building a database engine that would allow the novice user to configure both the structure and the presentation layer. I read this Wired piece (despite its sometimes uncharitable portrayal of snobby coders) as being about forging continuity. Even more credit is owed, I think, to the visionary code-meisters who do the work of ensuring that some coding neighborhoods don't function as locked-gate communities.
(Despite being raised by someone who was a bona fide computing visionary, I linger mostly at the superficial tinkering end of the spectrum. Relative to TWGG community, I'm a sheepish non-coder; relative to my other social orbits, I'm the geek who isn't scared of wading into code.) FileMaker and tiddlywiki, despite being born a couple decades apart, are similarly "gateway" projects (and maybe Airtable is the latest?). Of course, Filemaker was hatched as commercial software (bear in mind -- it hatched when software could only proliferate by way of 5.25" floppy drives), and TW is an open-source gift. But even Filemaker has moved toward an open-platform approach recently. At any rate, what these continuity-building platforms make possible is this invitation: Come in through the front door, try using it as-is for a while, then peek under the hood here and there (with some scripting, filters, and GUI tweaks), and eventually find your own sweet spot of knowing what to tackle at home and what snippets/plugins/solutions to beg, borrow, or buy from the savvier folks. Yes please! -Springer On Friday, December 4, 2020 at 6:24:20 PM UTC-5 Soren Bjornstad wrote: > 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/3b5ccc1f-dc77-45ea-9be2-075fbd5bc33dn%40googlegroups.com.
