@aparrish this is a very good thought to have, but it's a very good thought that also has a lot of nuance and complicated layers to it.
it's still good to try to keep programs usable+customizable even to people with no/little programming knowledge, but also have (emacs-style?) programability easily and visibly available, letting them engage with programming as much or as little as they like.
programming is annoyingly hard to teach: it's a creative process, like art, and there is no single right way to do it, but also with strict and deterministic rules such that there are still hard and fast ways to be wrong. this can be very frustrating for students if they can't form a base level intuition for it.
i think i saw this in a TED talk once, where the speaker was like "everyone can draw", and as proof drew a stick figure and said "you can do that too" (the idea being, maybe you can't pump out a mona lisa, but stick figures still count for something, and some people did a lot with just stick figures).
i think something similar applies to programming: sure, maybe you won't implement a B-tree or a kernel driver, but if you know how to read a cook book, and/or think you could write down a series of instructions for someone else to follow, then you kind of already know how to program.
programming is also more accessible than ever; we have tons of (mostly free) resources, you can just download a language for free, etc. LLMs *maybe* could do some good by introducing folks to the idea of "making something yourself", but then they also encourage people to get stuck at this level of not really knowing how program (since "you don't need it"), and LLM companies have *every* incentive to lean into the latter.
