Comment Re:learning curve? (Score 2, Insightful) 72
That's delusional. I've been at this longer than a lot of users here have been alive, yet the only "complex" applications I've seen are either unnecessarily complex or complex for reasons completely unrelated to programming.
It's not like cooking at all. That's just wishful thinking.
Programming is easy. Ridiculously easy. You know this, I know this. Why hide it?
Why not produce easy tools for non-programmers to use? We use programming languages to make writing software easier, after all. Why are modern languages and tools becoming increasingly more complex? Software isn't getting more complex in general, so why are our tools? What are we afraid will happen? That we'll lose our jobs? That people won't admire us for a skill easily attainable by young children?
there's nothing wrong with making tuna casserole (using Hypercard to create a simple database application), but don't try to kid yourself it's basically the same thing as creating a full course meal at a four-star restaurant (writing low-level, high-performance code in C).
But it is! The EXACT same skills and principles apply equally in both cases. (Note: This is not the case for cooking. Your analogy breaks immediately.) The only difference is that you need to know a few additional technical details to use C effectively. That's tangential to programming, no different than something like domain specific knowledge you'd need writing programs for use in different industries.
