For those who aren't code literate, there are diminishing opportunities to tinker with settings, to chain together workflows, to custom-build solutions. People often talk about how the iPhone itself is hermetically sealed, but playing with Hone made me reflect on how the app model in general shuts users out. It got me thinking about my relationship with apps more broadly-namely, how I've accepted that they're things for me to use, not create. But for me, a regular old smartphone user, it was totally unfamiliar.

The small thrill of using Hone-fiddling with settings on my computer, seeing them reflected instantly in an app on my phone-is something every developer and designer will be familiar with. Languages like Swift, Apple's recent creation, are slowly starting to realize these ambitions.Įven though Hone was built for a far more specific and prosaic purpose, it seemed to me a glimpse of how these new tools could someday make it easier for all users to regain a sense of agency-something that's been lost to a large degree in the mobile age. The next generation of tools could make it easier for programmers and designers to realize their ideas-to spend less time debugging and more time dreaming, designing, and refining.

His 2012 essay ' Learnable Programming' lucidly outlines everything that's so maddening about traditional programming languages. In an interview earlier this year, he offered this dim summary: 'It’s not like a boat with a couple of holes that we can patch it’s more like trying to sail across an ocean on a pile of accrued garbage.' Bret Victor, a former Apple interface designer, is another persuasive proponent. Loren Brichter, creator of the original Twitter app for the iPhone, is one prominent engineer who has recently expressed his frustration with the state of programming.

'If they launch Xcode, they're afraid to click anything, just like your Mom is afraid to click the wrong button on the VCR.' Even the professional designers at Wire, presumably technically proficient to some degree, get nervous when confronted with code, Kase says. The basic problem: Programming languages are daunting. Hone is just one small piece of a much larger movement centered on rethinking how we make software.

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