The reason I get so annoyed about people pitching LLMs as a way to 'democratise programming' or as end-user programming tools is that they solve the wrong problem.

The hard part of programming is not writing code. It's unambiguously expressing your problem and desired solution. Imagine if LLMs were perfect programmers. All you have to do is write a requirements document and they turn it into a working program. Amazing, right? Well, not if you've ever seen what most people write in a requirements document or seen the output when a team of good programmers works from a requirements document.

The most popular end-user programming language in the world (and, by extension, the most popular programming language), with over a billion users, is the Calc language that is embedded in Excel. It is not popular because it's a good language. Calc is a terrible programming language by pretty much any metric. It's popular because Excel (which is also a terrible spreadsheet, but that's a different rant) is basically a visual debugger and a reactive programming environment. Every temporary value in an Excel program is inspectable and it's trivial to write additional debug expressions that are automatically updated when the values that they're observing change.

Much as I detest it as a spreadsheet, Excel is probably the best debugger that I have ever used, including Lisp and Smalltalk.

The thing that makes end-user programming easy in Excel is not that it's easy to write code, it's that it's easy to see what the code is doing and understand why it's doing the wrong thing. If you replace this with an LLM that generates Python, and the Python program is wrong, how does a normal non-Python-programming human debug it? They try asking the LLM, but it doesn't actually understand the Python so it will often send them down odd rabbit holes. In contrast, every intermediate step in an Excel / Calc program is visible. Every single intermediate value is introspectable. Adding extra sanity checks (such as 'does money leaving the account equal the money paid to suppliers?') is trivial.

If you want to democratise programming, build better debuggers, don't build tools that rapidly generate code that's hard to debug.

AAAARGH! I'm not at all surprised, but NIST's excellent whitepaper on Inclusive Language (NIST.IR.8366) has been withdrawn:

https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2021/NIST.IR.8366.pdf

This was an excellent resource that I reference all the time. I feared it would go away so I made a snapshot a few weeks back that I uploaded here: https://nygren.org/archived/NIST.IR.8366.pdf

#InclusiveLanguage

Massachusetts law now lets schools install cameras on their buses to issue fines against drivers who threaten kids by passing stopped buses illegally.

Here’s a guide to bringing them in your city or town:

https://mass.streetsblog.org/2025/01/22/want-safety-cameras-on-your-kids-school-buses-heres-how-to-get-them
#mapoli

"Over the past year, the E-bike Lending Library has loaned bikes more than 500 times, with borrowers traveling more than 16000 miles since the program began. ... [this year, borrowers who later purchased] will travel more than 328,000 miles on e-bikes."

https://communitypedalpower.org/blog/2024/10/celebrating-one-year-of-the-e-bike-lending-library/