This takes a very narrow view of programming and syntax and draws out some possible paths. I agree that we should and can make programming accessible. The main difference in how we should do that in my opinion isn't to do things with currently popular languages, that's building kinds of 'training wheels'.
What kind of programming did gain widespread adoption? Spreadsheets. How do they work? Functions: input -> output.
We should focus on representing dataflows with functions. I don't care if that's visual or F#. Just don't keep trying to take a representation designed for machines C, etc, and finding that it's not a good high-level fit for humans at large. Now of course some folks would find concrete procedural logic more approachable. That's fine too we already have lots of ways to train and fill those roles.
FORTRAN, COBOL, and SQL made programming accessible. FORTRAN, in particular, was not hard to program formulas in, and scientist and engineers had no need in “coders.”
Apparently, something was missing, though, and that something, when it was added, turned out to be hard.
What kind of programming did gain widespread adoption? Spreadsheets. How do they work? Functions: input -> output.
We should focus on representing dataflows with functions. I don't care if that's visual or F#. Just don't keep trying to take a representation designed for machines C, etc, and finding that it's not a good high-level fit for humans at large. Now of course some folks would find concrete procedural logic more approachable. That's fine too we already have lots of ways to train and fill those roles.