Everyone gets a scribe

I watched a talk by Geoffrey Litt called "Dynamic Documents as Personal Software" given at the Recurse Center. Below is a short summary, and then a comparison I could not stop thinking about while watching it. Spoilers ahead. The talk is worth the hour and this post doesn't do it justice. The talkLitt opens with a split. Programmers can get the machine to do whatever they want, everyone else gets whatever the programmers hand them. Apps embody that, because an app is a box of data schema, computation and views someone else packed. Maps knows locations, the weather app knows forecasts, your notes app knows text, and none of them know about each other. So when you plan a trip you become the glue, copying between apps and running half the computation in your head. He questions the split almost immediately, though. Spreadsheets, he thinks, are a classic case of people who do not consider themselves programmers doing a lot of computational thinking. His answer is to start from the document…