XP, EUP, EP

Some ago whilst talking about XP (Xtreme Programming) we also talked quite a bit about EUP (End User Programming) which, for the time being, seems to have ended up in skin editors. More about that later.

Here's a very modest example of reinitiative and of not soooo long agobut. It's buggy and damaged, got broken, was meant as an anchor and I forgot about it for just too long.

End user programming as an imagination has always interested me as well as AAPL, MSFT, GOOG, Bill Atkinson, Paul Allen and many others. But the name and brand was wrong all from the beginning. Put "End" in your phrase in the very first place and you've done it all. There is no such stupid things as naming blunders and no such persons as end users. There still are lots of subtle mistakes to correct.

A current form of EUP, skin editing, could get better and more interesting if we will do it the right way. Having some of the users edit skins the way it is done now is what I'd call a crippled API. I always stop worrying about MSFT and GOOG crippled APIs. Sure they are for professional programmers who have seen better, but ...

With Javascript and PHP the C syntax heritage gets in our way too. Python and Ruby tackled the problem semantically, i think, but their syntactic sugar is definitely for the geek (as goes for Rebol, i think). Basic used to be a bit better there but had and has its own host of ugly problems. Logo, far and out the best tool to teach the mathematically uninitiated recursion, has all but nearly disappeard. Imaging what we would have today, had Logo (and TeX) been used in Austrian (European, World) schools (instead of Office and sometimes Basic) to teach computer handling. But no, impossible, not for children, but for the teachers to learn.

Fucking around with AppleScript, Windows Scripting Host and the likes can teach you it goes where all the better scripting languages go. They begin with the so called end user in mind and, in the very best case, end up in enabling persons with an itch to become professional programmers and thus join the ever growing computing elite.

EUP is an illusion or tiny niche you tell me. Even Kay and Ingalls and others with their Squeak project are outside anything important? I tell you it is not. Goldberg, Merry, Kay and Ingalls were right. Children will do it. If I were a shortsighted rather than midsighted marketing man, I'd call it Web 3.1 and would think of 16 bit windows success. I will not fall for that trap. After all these years EUP still is a vision and its goals are not clear enough.

Still I think it is one of the ingredients that we need to go on forward with. True computer literacy demands it. No User will ever be able to enter in a real dialogue with the technorati club without a basic understanding of programming.

Lets start with making a new name for it. Let's call it something like EP (for everybody programs). Better suggestions are warmely welcomed.

I for myself am still more interested in this than in pulling xmlstructured spreadsheet data around the web. Some of those selfish memes work painfully slow but work they do.

Sorry for not linking enough (save my own) , it's hard (for me) to express my thought while jumping round the web.

Addenda to earlier: Die Sonntagsblickredaktion in Schwitzerland (mein eigenes Vorurteil) hat antville/twoday weblogs. kris point to that one. It seems to be a mirror of sobli.twoday.net. kris found that out, too. Undermining proceeds.

More sad stuff on Ladio LoserLand traumwind pointed chris (that snip also has smarties on A+, browser and Ajax) who pointed me to indefinite (which I wrongly interpreted as infinite, thx, earl) becoming quite finite. tiny had only the finite (should be definite) side of it. That's what i like: cooperation in a non deterministic environment. All the interesting things most probably are only 3 links away (or so).