Geppeto: Consumer's Approach to Programming

[Amellifera]

Thanks for your comments. Since my first remarks, I've played with Geppeto a little. It shows promise. Interesting to see how a truly non-IT consumer would take to it. BTW: Please review your tutorial -- there are missing "Click" actions after the two Copy/Paste sequences. -- Mark

[geppetoteam]

We've gone over the tutorial, and didn't find any missing actions, however, some of the actions weren't very distinguishable from the rest of the text so we fixed that. Thanks for your comment!

[geppetoteam]

About the comment reply below... unfortunately, I made a flawed assumption about the order the posts will appear, so please read the first reply, and the other four in reverse order. Sorry about the mistake.

[Amellifera]

Interesting but certainly nothing new. In my 20+ years as a professional programmer, I've seen several attempts to provide end users with the means to "write" their own "programs" (e.g., Clarion, MS Access). Each had its loyal adherents. The problems are the same: 1) It's hard to get beyond trivial apps without real coding and 2) End users can become dependent on ill-design systems and have no means to scale them when it becomes necessary. Perhaps Geppeto sees away around this. I'll try it.

[geppetoteam]

First of all, thank you for the constructive comment. From our experience, we can certainly agree that the problems you mention are real, but we'd like to clarify our idea about consumer programming. The history of programming has shown that new paradigms and languages never really replace old ones, but rather complement them.

[geppetoteam]

Our goal is to remove coding from the consumer programming process, and make it a side effect transparent to the consumer. In retrospect, the name "consumer application composition tool" might have been a better choice from the perspective of professional programmers. But from the perspective of consumers themselves, we believe that "consumer programming" is the right choice.

[geppetoteam]

We claim that, given the right tools, consumers will be able to create these applications. Also, as more functionality becomes available through software gadgets, the applications consumers create will get more complex. By talking about consumers instead of end users, we tried to steer away from the bad perception of attempts to allow "non-programmers to program". In presenting this idea, one of the problems we face is the perceived equivalence between programming and coding.

[geppetoteam]

Within higher programming languages, we're seeing scripting languages replace system languages in some applications for similar reasons. When talking about consumer programming, we don't expect consumers to implement complex algorithms and systems and replace professional programmers. Rather, there is an area of application development that there's not enough programmers to cover, and that is the development of personalized applications.

[geppetoteam]

For example, machine code is still handwritten for real-time applications in embedded systems (among other things), and it is hard to imagine that higher level languages will ever be used for these problems. Still, the advent of higher level languages made it possible to create applications that previously weren't feasible, and also allowed for quicker development of more reliable systems in some areas.

[Brklja2]

svaka čast dečki!!