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Panzerschrektoday at 5:24 AM3 repliesview on HN

I generally don't think it's a good idea to develop a language for non-developers. It was tried before multiple times and the end goal has not been achieved. Sooner or later one realizes, that professional developers are still necessary, even for languages initially designed for "normies". But such a language is typically not good enough for them, it lacks necessary abstractions, flexibility, performance or something else.

We have a lot of examples for this, like COBOL, SQL, Visual Basic.


Replies

shuwixtoday at 7:59 AM

By your logic ... BASIC is useless. By your logic ... people are born a programmers.

Yet BASIC was literally a first stepping stone for small kids into the World of programming. Most of what we have now is because some 6-7yo kids in 80's and 90's had BASIC and could figure out stuff by themself, without external help.

viceconsoletoday at 5:49 AM

Your three examples historically were successful in achieving widespread usage, and in the case of SQL, shows no sign of disappearing.

show 3 replies
pjmlptoday at 8:18 AM

Not only were COBOL, SQL, Visual Basic market successes, as mentioned by others, now non-developers are even using plain English with AI agents.