As a non-programmer it breaks my heart that there is no easy on-ramp for the rest of us. When I got started in the old days we had HyperCard which was my tool of choice — you could so real programming on it, or you could do something very simple. Apple killed Hypercard by neglect, but then Microsoft put out Visual Basic. The result? Within a few years they created a monster that would scare away non-programmers. I'm even amazed that tools like Dreamweaver which should make HTML easy for idiots have become these complex beasts.
To me the PC represented a revolution of letting the rest of us own a computer -- and taking it out of the hands of the high priests of mainframes. But I'd like to see the next revolution occur where non-geeks can build apps. No they don't have to be complex apps, but even something that's like the old HyperCard would be cool.
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As a non-programmer it breaks my heart that there is no easy on-ramp for the rest of us. When I got started in the old days we had HyperCard which was my tool of choice — you could so real programming on it, or you could do something very simple. Apple killed Hypercard by neglect, but then Microsoft put out Visual Basic. The result? Within a few years they created a monster that would scare away non-programmers. I'm even amazed that tools like Dreamweaver which should make HTML easy for idiots have become these complex beasts.
To me the PC represented a revolution of letting the rest of us own a computer -- and taking it out of the hands of the high priests of mainframes. But I'd like to see the next revolution occur where non-geeks can build apps. No they don't have to be complex apps, but even something that's like the old HyperCard would be cool.
You should check out Google App Inventor - http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/ - and also GameSalad - http://gamesalad.com/
The latter in particular seems to offer some easy ways to create some interesting games without much development knowledge.