(2009-10-14) Neward Simple Platform Needed

Ted Neward wrote a post with a misleading title "Agile is treating the symptoms, not the disease". His real point is: Which means, if somebody working for a small school district in western Pennsylvania wants to build a simple application for tracking students' attendance (rather than tracking it on paper anymore), what do they do?... Or, perhaps, let me ask it this way: your 16-year-old wants to build a system to track the cards in his Magic CardDeck. What language do you teach him? We are in desperate need of simplicity in this industry. Whoever gets that, and gets it right, defines the "Next Big Thing". See Language For Learning Programming, Situated Software.

See also his update and all comments, etc.

Related Aug'2009 Briar Pig musings: Apple's HyperCard, in the 80's, was my idea of the way to go, because newbies could make new scripts based on old ones, learning how to code in small, incremental steps. Using HyperCard, it was feasible to try things and see what happens: good experimental method, and good for learning... Gee, why aren't there tools commonly used by non-professionals, so folks become producers of computing tech instead of just consumers alone. Isn't there obvious value in this?