Making development environments for non-programmers that are useful to non-programmers and possibly flexible enough to create real products seems pretty hard.

I know a lot of programmers are very skeptical of anything like that for various reasons.

Funny. Seems that programmers wish they can design. And designers wish they can program. And both parties feel bad.

I've been working with brilliant people who don't know how to program. They have been very valuable and very capable of building a business. But in a typical startup you get to that phase where everyone is working full throttle and then what happens is that these brilliant people do stuff like manual data cleansing work for weeks on end simply because they cannot bring themselves to learn how a loop and a regex works. That's a shame. Trouble is that sometimes that kind of work cannot be outsourced because it requires intimate knowledge about the project to do it right.

That the "business person" in a typical startup doesn't have anything better to do during the build phase creates typical startups, in my opinion. Brilliant people should be doing brilliant things. If they're not, maybe they're not.

Encouraging words for designers.