What’s a direction you were certain personal computing was going, but then it just veered off into all this instead?
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Seeing SmallTalk, Hypercard, Visual Basic, RPG Maker 2000, etc, I was quite sure as a teenager that end-user programming would become ubiquitous within another ten years or so. It's surprising how little progress has been made.
I worry we've gone from "users" to "customers" in a way that intrinsically precludes the concept of people using products as tools.
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Yes, I fear it's in some ways more difficult than ever due to the trends you describe. e.g. the architecture of SaaS software in particular makes it very difficult to work with data; kludges with Zapier and AirTable emerge as a natural result…
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Pretty sure AppleScript bears a lot of responsibility here. It was a great idea and a train-wreck of a language. I don’t think I ever wrote a script successfully.
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Same, and yet at age 10 I was able to teach myself HyperTalk. How can two languages be so similar and so completely different?