this is to say nothing of learning of the metacontext of, like, a Terminal app and remote UNIX server shells and docker containers or whatever. just "a text file with source code in it" is an intimidatingly stark UI. all the stuff to make this "easier" (i.e. vscode, etc) does not make its fundaments any easier to discover, there's no "if statement" or "while loop" button anywhere, even with the most advanced tools in the biz you gotta know what to type to get started
@glyph Programming languages are pretty brutally unforgiving, comparatively speaking
I can pick a digital brush tool in a paint program and make -some- sort of image. It may not be the image I want. But it's -an- image. There's a very achievable feedback loop between try something different -> new image, hopefully closer to what I want
The infinity of possible things I could type that are invalid programs vastly outweigh the valid
How do you get an approachable feedback loop when you have to climb such a mountain to even start at step one? The IDEs we had before offered no path forward without someone's external guide
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