Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Those who don’t program still seek the Holy Grail of business: the ability to flush programmers from their lives.

Google recently launched its App Maker. Its a tool kit that allows persons who don’t know how to program to write programs. Well, sort of. I guess Google’s product, similar to other similar products, moves non-programmers closer to programming without programmers.

That is the Holy Grail of business and those persons who love to work in business without really working:

If we, the cool kids,  can just get rid of those nerds once and for all.

Whoa! Wait a dog gone minute here. This is all about technology and bringing the promise of technology to the masses and spreading wonderfulness to all and stuff like that. Why am I bring back the crass concept of the cool kids and the nerds in the high school cafeteria?

Well, sometimes we hate to admit what is happening. In computing, the cool kids—those with the grand ideas—have always been forced to talk at the nerds—those who know something about “ones and zeros.” Without the nerds, the cool kids never saw their ideas come to fruition, i.e., money.

The trouble with the nerds is that they are nerdy. You know, well, I won’t go into details about …

The big trouble with some of the nerds is that they realized their nerdiness really bothered the cool kids. And, what is worse, some of the nerds realized that the cool kids NEEDED them. Aha, power! We can nerdly rub our nerdiness in the face of the cool kids and they can’t run us away from the cool table in the cafeteria like they did in high school.

Hence, the cool kids constantly pay some nerds to invent a technology that removed the need of the nerds. The programming tool for non-programmers is always on the horizon. It has been for at least 35 years (my professional lifetime). Older persons have told me that this Holy Grail was almost invented the day after 20th-century programming was invented.

The search continues. Until it ends, some nerds will continue to torment some cool kids with glee.