The World Would Be a Better Place if Non-Programmers Could Program

Abstract

Each task that anyone, man or machine, might want to perform imposes some set of computational requirements on the performer. This is obvious—how could it be otherwise? But if you ask anyone what the computational requirements are that a class of tasks imposes, you surely won’t get a very good answer. As application programmers, we can expose the computational requirements of the task we just wrote a program to solve. But we typically do so by pointing to the program; this doesn’t provide much insight, either to ourselves or to others, into the requirements that other, similar tasks impose. From the perspective of one who simply wants an understanding of the computational requirements of a class of tasks, the application program over-commits.