This is just an adventure in making the word programming as abstract as possible. There's no practical use to doing so, except perhaps to try and ease users that want to learn to program into it.
Historically the distinction wasn't as stark as it is today. Hypertext as envisioned by Ted Nelson and furthered by Tim Berners-Lee's contributions through HTTP/HTML was much more read-write from the get-go.<p>But you can even go further back in time to Douglas Engelbart's "Mother of All Demos" and Smalltalk during the 70s to see that these foundational technologies tried to inspire and emphasize user empowerment and with it <i>end-user programming</i>.<p>Things evolved very differently though as systems have become ever more centralized and complex necessitating ease of use and security. It would need systemic shifts on many levels to return to the ideas of the visionaries in our field, the biggest hurdle probably being the "privatization" of the internet itself. Everything is very commercial by design; that was the plan since the early 80s. Elon Musk's Starlink and its use as part of warfare is that DARPA idea fully realized. It only took ~40 years.<p>We might need to reclaim "territory" from the big platforms and run more communication lines ourselves or at least pull them out from commercial interests. It all flows down to the lower levels; meaning system software and open hardware platforms like RISC-V.<p>Maybe it's about time for some healthy "devolution" now that we seem to have implemented proof that all of this made sense at and until some point?
The author is playing semantic word games.<p>Making a folder is not programming a computer.<p>Nor is making a word processing document.<p>Using a spreadsheet probably is.
ugh we could do without the critical theory; the evil technoarchy oppressing users, etc.<p>The divide here is really between graphical and text interfaces. I think vastly more people would be 'disenfranchised' if everyone was 'empowered' by having to use a CLI, so the inherent non-programmability of GUIs (whatever the author claims, making a new folder is not 'programming') seems like a worthwhile trade-off.<p>An ideal might be if, as the author falsely claims, apps actually were structured as CLI or APIs overlaid with a GUI. You could then program the CLI/API layer, or re-configure or even re-write the GUI layer to taste.