←back to thread

Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

1401 points alankay | 1 comments | 20 Jun 16 18:04 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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).
Show context
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?
replies(7): >>11940734 #>>11940944 #>>11941125 #>>11941144 #>>11941516 #>>11942268 #>>11942793 #
1. retroafroman ◴[20 Jun 16 20:12 UTC] No.11941125[source]▶
As someone pretty close to this camp, it comes down to your last bullet point - needing to do it, in my opinion. A smaller subset of those people will also learn VBA for the same reason-it helps them get their job done. The benefit those two have is that they are either built in to the tools already (VBA), or a DBA does most of the set up and the used mostly just runs queries against it and doesn't have to worry too much about indexing, performance, schemas, etc (SQL). If I were to try to turn them onto python, it'd be an effort to get it installed and then get them to use the commandline.