VBA is the counterexample. A lot of people who wouldn't usually think of themselves as programmers used it - sometimes still use it - to hack together useful scripts and processors.

Ironically, it's not particularly accessible or simple. It's certainly more complicated than 80s-style BASIC.

And the number of VBA users compared to the number of Office users is not huge.

Even so - VBA proves that if you make a development tool accessible enough and obviously useful enough at least some non-programmers will start writing code for it.

The challenge for something like Eve is usefulness. What's the user benefit? To date I'm not seeing one - which doesn't mean there isn't one, just that so far it's not obvious to me.

I can certainly understand a vision that makes technology of all kinds far more accessible and responsive. But asking users to make their own code probably isn't the answer there - I think it's more likely to be some kind of contextual inference/AI/NLP system that's smart enough to make good guesses about what users want and handles the low level stuff for them.

VBA also sucks a lot of people into programming proper. A few years ago I started by recording macros and then reading the code they generated, then writing my own code. I learned what a database was by making a sales lead tracker in Access.

Fast forward to today and I am writing scripts and building apps in ruby, python, JS, Java, Clojure and Haskell.

Same experience here, although it was 15 years ago! (And I made my lead tracker in Excel itself -- didn't move on to Access until the next project.) I still hold on to the first VBA for Excel programming book I got back then, purely for the nostalgia. Fun times!

Isn't it incredible that VBA is still around (and probably unchanged since the late 90's). Bummer that MS has let Access stagnate for the past decade.