The author is frustrated by a real and frustrating problem, but he's missing why things are this way.
The "triumvirate of HTML/CSS/Javascript" isn't just a technology. It's a social consensus. It's not actually "designed" in a meaningful sense -- it's evolved.
And things pretty much need to be this way, unless you want to be an island. Even if you have the ambition and the resources to throw it all away and "do it right" from scratch, by the time you finish the world will have moved on and your perfect gem will be obsolete. Real technology is always iterative.
The same constraints apply to programming languages in general, because they truly are languages that human beings use for thinking. Languages and their associated cultures can only evolve so fast. It's not really a technical issue, it's a social issue.
The author's assertion that our "arcane" interfaces persist out of a kind of perverse pride just doesn't ring true to my experience. Programmers cry tears of joy when they get to throw away something old and arcane because they don't need it anymore. And his assumption that visual programming will necessarily be better than textual programming is completely unproven.
Anyone who could actually make programming easy would reap vast wealth. The incentive is there. If it's really a no-brainer to build visual programming tools, well, where are they? There must be something harder about it than you think if we're still waiting.
An interesting thought about evolution is that text-based programming languages are exquisitely evolve-able, because the technology and effort to evolve a language or create a new one aren't too far out of our reach. If you don't care too much about efficiency, you can create a new language from an old one, and pass it around for others to try out.
This may be why there are 100's of text based languages, but I can think of only one graphical language -- LabVIEW -- in widespread use. LabVIEW requires a monumental organization to maintain. Adding a structural feature to the language, requires changing the entire GUI, menus, and so forth.
I suspect that if LabVIEW came out with a text based option for dataflow programming with support for their massive libraries, folks would abandon the graphical interface.
Maybe graphical isn't always better. Maybe text is really the best way to express programs after all. We could wait for programming to become "intuitive," or learn to develop our intuitions.
An anecdote about graphical systems. When I read tutorials for Windows, it's usually a lot of text interspersed with pictures of windows and dialogs. Even videos. Walking someone through a process over the phone is excruciating.
The same process using Linux: Open the terminal and enter this text.
In fact, Windows tutorials are starting to use: Press the start button and enter some text. I find the device manager by entering "device manager" into the start button menu, not by following an "intuitive" GUI.
The "triumvirate of HTML/CSS/Javascript" isn't just a technology. It's a social consensus. It's not actually "designed" in a meaningful sense -- it's evolved.
And things pretty much need to be this way, unless you want to be an island. Even if you have the ambition and the resources to throw it all away and "do it right" from scratch, by the time you finish the world will have moved on and your perfect gem will be obsolete. Real technology is always iterative.
The same constraints apply to programming languages in general, because they truly are languages that human beings use for thinking. Languages and their associated cultures can only evolve so fast. It's not really a technical issue, it's a social issue.
The author's assertion that our "arcane" interfaces persist out of a kind of perverse pride just doesn't ring true to my experience. Programmers cry tears of joy when they get to throw away something old and arcane because they don't need it anymore. And his assumption that visual programming will necessarily be better than textual programming is completely unproven.
Anyone who could actually make programming easy would reap vast wealth. The incentive is there. If it's really a no-brainer to build visual programming tools, well, where are they? There must be something harder about it than you think if we're still waiting.