All sorts of non-techies were able to do that with Hypercard. I remember a shop that had some sort of stock control system the owner had built himself.
Things like PHP, VB and to some extent Excel had some success, but only by forcing the non-technical to become technical. In actuality they're just regular programming with a slightly less steep learning curve. Only Excel escapes this somewhat.
Most IDEs, and XCode have no pretence at catering to user-friendliness or the non-technical. Apart from anything else you have to search for, find, and install XCode from the app store - I know it's not hard, but that's not the point. The learning version of PyCharm for instance just integrates some tutorials. You still have to become a techie to succeed.
There's a distinct hole in the experience in not having Hypercard, or even the simple BASIC of 8 bits ready to go, with examples. It both reflects and reinforces the position as consumption device, and has distanced creation.
Far more were able to dip into a little ugly BASIC to knock up a menu, calculator or whatever, just as many were able to build surprisingly complex things in Hypercard without ever thinking they made that leap.
I think slowmovintarget has it by saying they never acknowledged they were programming at all. I'd liken it to the kids who were terrible at, and hated maths, but could do frighteningly quick and accurate mental arithmetic when working weekend at their parent's market stall or shop.
Maybe the magic is the ability to hide that you're doing something somewhat technical.
Things like PHP, VB and to some extent Excel had some success, but only by forcing the non-technical to become technical. In actuality they're just regular programming with a slightly less steep learning curve. Only Excel escapes this somewhat.
Most IDEs, and XCode have no pretence at catering to user-friendliness or the non-technical. Apart from anything else you have to search for, find, and install XCode from the app store - I know it's not hard, but that's not the point. The learning version of PyCharm for instance just integrates some tutorials. You still have to become a techie to succeed.
There's a distinct hole in the experience in not having Hypercard, or even the simple BASIC of 8 bits ready to go, with examples. It both reflects and reinforces the position as consumption device, and has distanced creation.