Yeah, people talk about necessary complexity vs unnecessary complexity.
"Unnecessary complexity" is all those arcane coding rituals that we do, that our users don't know or care about, but we have to do because our current tools demand it.
We can't get rid of necessary complexity and so we probably can't design a programming interface for someone that is completely illiterate in math & logic.
But what we can do is 1) Eliminate unnecessary complexity, and 2) Provide helpful, structured, interactive, learnable tools, which help guide the author as they do all the "necessary" steps. If we just did that then that would be a huge improvement from the state of the art.
"Unnecessary complexity" is all those arcane coding rituals that we do, that our users don't know or care about, but we have to do because our current tools demand it.
We can't get rid of necessary complexity and so we probably can't design a programming interface for someone that is completely illiterate in math & logic.
But what we can do is 1) Eliminate unnecessary complexity, and 2) Provide helpful, structured, interactive, learnable tools, which help guide the author as they do all the "necessary" steps. If we just did that then that would be a huge improvement from the state of the art.