Programming

It's hard to paint it in broad strokes, but yeah that was part of it. The one that really comes to mind for me is this thing called ilog which tried to map phrases in English to code (sort of like Gherkin does for tests, but I actually like Gherkin). It effectively hid very important logic for how the system worked in this really weird layer that you had to use a special IDE for that was super difficult to get working properly. I remember that seeing the text descriptions was sort of easy but seeing what actually happened was really difficult. There was a view that would actually give you something that was like code but it was just too difficult to get to. Even then, it was something generated, not something you could edit.

I've sort of thought about this a lot because it's fascinating to me. I think the best option for stuff like this if you want to really pursue it is to use "beginner friendly" languages (Python comes to mind, despite me hating it lol) with some sort of easy web interface to upload and download them. Maybe use JavaScript since it works nice in the browser and can be run right there for tests or whatever. Make some sort of sandbox to limit what can be done or just have devs more actively review it (maybe a PR process). Maybe even have the webtool just be a front end for a tool that interacts with git (or some forge like GitHub specifically if it needs to do stuff like opening pull requests).