It was apparently gone before Jobs got back, but the same point still stands. The people who put together accounting systems and the like in Hypercard were unusual in being willing (and having the time) to put forth the effort of building anything complex. They're almost certainly the same people who would have put something together in GW-Basic, because they needed what they were building.
I'm a professional programmer, and I've got enough in my plate to be happy to let clients build some portion of things. But they almost entirely won't, even when given software designed to let them do just that. I've never encountered any sort of form-builder or report-generator or whatever that was designed to work for clients "without needing a programmer" where clients didn't end up asking programmers to do all the form-building, report-designing, anyway.
It's like they have jobs of their own to do or something. It's like division of labor makes sense and is inevitable in any non-tiny organisation.
Back when everything was on paper, a technology virtually everyone could access by reading and writing (or typing), lots of people still had specialized jobs based around creating and organizing documents within organizations. Hell, most people are perfectly able to clean and vacuum, but beyond a certain size of 9-to-5 organisation, places hire janitors.
> But they almost entirely won't, even when given software designed to let them do just that. I've never encountered any sort of form-builder or report-generator or whatever that was designed to work for clients "without needing a programmer" where clients didn't end up asking programmers to do all the form-building, report-designing, anyway.
Did you interface with the individual workers, or company as a whole? My experience is that usually, the software doesn't let workers do what they need, the workers end up working around it with Excel, and at some point information will trickle down through two departments and three layers of managers that some piece of software they're paying for needs adjustment.
> It's like they have jobs of their own to do or something. It's like division of labor makes sense and is inevitable in any non-tiny organisation.
Exactly. But their jobs are almost never correctly captured by software, so people get creative and invent their own workarounds. The unending popularity of Excel is a great example of this. Asking someone else to fix your software for you has large communications cost and time delay; asking programmers has also a large monetary cost.
And mine isn't. Among some of our clients, being able to do anything in Excel is an unusual skill. Among others, they do nothing more than basic spreadsheet work, using nothing more advanced than cross-sheet references. In twenty years of this job, I haven't run into any of the fabled Excel spreadsheet apps. I'm sure they're out there, but I'm also sure there's plenty of the world that doesn't use them.
I'm a professional programmer, and I've got enough in my plate to be happy to let clients build some portion of things. But they almost entirely won't, even when given software designed to let them do just that. I've never encountered any sort of form-builder or report-generator or whatever that was designed to work for clients "without needing a programmer" where clients didn't end up asking programmers to do all the form-building, report-designing, anyway.
It's like they have jobs of their own to do or something. It's like division of labor makes sense and is inevitable in any non-tiny organisation.
Back when everything was on paper, a technology virtually everyone could access by reading and writing (or typing), lots of people still had specialized jobs based around creating and organizing documents within organizations. Hell, most people are perfectly able to clean and vacuum, but beyond a certain size of 9-to-5 organisation, places hire janitors.