One of Rich Hickey's talks talks about this (I think it was 'Are We There Yet?'). In it, he references musical instruments, which are absolutely NOT designed for beginners. Why should they be? Tools shouldn't be designed specifically to PRECLUDE beginners, but why should any of them be optimized for beginners?
A good tool should allow someone to progress from beginner to novice to expert, but at the end of the day, the expert is who the tool is really designed for. Anything else is just bonus.
Nobody is arguing for replacing expert tools with these beginner-optimized languages. Continuing the instrument metaphor, I'd say they're like recorders: being taught in elementary school won't make them ubiquitous in the professional industry. But they're a great way to introduce students to a simple, relatively inexpensive way to create music.
>In it, he references musical instruments, which are absolutely NOT designed for beginners.
Musical instruments increasingly are designed for beginners. A typical software suite makes it easy to make decent music by tapping a few buttons more or less in time.
Classical instruments aren't designed for beginners, because they weren't designed at all - they evolved from crude and simple historical originals.
But they're a subset of music as a whole.
Arguably the problem is that computer languages are NOT designed for anyone. This is why so many software products and services are significantly broken so much of the time - to an extent that would be ridiculous and completely unacceptable for hardware objects.
I don't see a problem with at least exploring new language models that have roots in perceptual psychology instead of in hardware design.
Classical instruments are designed, just as much as any other artifact created by humans. If pianos were not designed, then neither were bicycles, looms or printing presses.
> Tools shouldn't be designed specifically to PRECLUDE beginners
I'm reminded of a lesser-known talk[1] by Dan Geer, in which he discusses cybersecurity maturing into its own field - its own science - using T. S. Kuhn's definition[2] as a rough guideline. One of the criteria used to recognize the transition into a specialized field was the use of jargon. Maturity as a stand-along field has happened when it becomes necessary to invent new jargon that is - by definition - inaccessible to outsiders.
To be clear, I completely agree that tools shouldn't preclude beginners whenever possible, but I suspect that my not be possible as everything becomes more specialized.
The more you advance in a field, the more you control you want to have over the concepts you work with and what you produce. So an expert will look for a more flexible tool, one that gives access to all these concepts. Whether that's a bare bones instrument or a computer program, it will be unsuitable for a beginner.
A good tool should allow someone to progress from beginner to novice to expert, but at the end of the day, the expert is who the tool is really designed for. Anything else is just bonus.