The Future Of End User Programming?

One of the Holy Grails of Computer Science for many decades has been to make the power of computer programming accessible to more and more people. The earliest "high level" languages, FORTRAN and COBOL, were intentionally designed to be written and understood by specific communities of users with problems to solve, namely the Scientific/Engineering and Business communities. As computing became more accessible to more people, the number of dedicated full time programmers mushroomed and formed a community unto itself, who largely created languages and tools by and for themselves to use. The end users, the people with the non-computing problems to solve, became isolated from the computer itself and were forced have their business problems encoded in the increasingly esoteric script of a powerful new programmer priesthood. But even throughout these "dark ages", a small number of valiant dissenters survived and flourished in distant monasteries and hermitages, dedicating their lives and technical prowess to liberate computing from its raised floor temples. Resistance was stiff, but not futile, as every decade or so breakthroughs like spreadsheets, Hypercard, 4GLs and HTML empowered more and more "non-programmers" to create their own computing solutions. Now, well into the second era of the Web, consumer-oriented websites like Flickr and YouTube routinely offer end users "snippets" of JavaScript code to reuse in their own software creations, their Facebook and MySpace pages. Projects like IBM's CoScripter have achieved programming by demonstration for end users. Mashup tools abound, and the Web is filled with billions of customized applications, most created by end users themselves. Have we finally achieved the goals of those happy few who dreamed of a world where programming was as common as dialing a telephone? Have we finally arrived at the Long Tail of Programming? And if we have built it, did they come? This talk will assess the current state of end user programming and present a heretical perspective about the future of this endeavor from a confessed true believer.