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Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

1401 points alankay | 1 comments | 20 Jun 16 18:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.237s | source

This request originated via recent discussions on HN, and the forming of HARC! at YC Research. I'll be around for most of the day today (though the early evening).
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losvedir ◴[20 Jun 16 19:25 UTC] No.11940630[source]▶
At my office a lot of the non-programmers (marketers, finance people, customer support, etc) write a fair bit of SQL. I've often wondered what it is about SQL that allows them to get over their fear of programming, since they would never drop into ruby or a "real" programming language. Things I've considered:

    * Graphical programming environment (they run the queries
      from pgadmin, or Postico, or some app like that)
    * Instant feedback - run the query get useful results
    * Compilation step with some type safety - will complain
      if their query is malformed
    * Are tables a "natural" way to think about data for humans?
    * Job relevance
Any ideas? Can we learn from that example to make real programming environments that are more "cross functional" in that more people in a company are willing to use them?
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1. mtrn ◴[20 Jun 16 19:36 UTC] No.11940734[source]▶
Just a thought: Is it mostly select statements that your colleagues write? Because if they do, they might not fear accidentally altering the data. I found that new programmers can get confused by the difference between things that are immutable and those that aren't.