> What user group are you talking about?

The kind of people who use such tools. The kind of people who can lookup DSLs to create dataviews, or copy&paste snippets to make up stuff. Something like a knowledge-system is not used by children or someone similar.

> Those people nevertheless have a need to build their own userland applications,

No, they do not. Not every user around the world has this demand. Most user don't have this demand. We are talking here about a minority of quite special usecases. Most people are not even able to mange their own files, and you mean they will use a complex knowledge-managment-system? People are even challenged with a simple todo-list or note-app. No way will they use something more complex.

> and no current tool serves them well; but a Nocode programmable knowledge database could do it.

No, it's not. Nocode is not magic. You still need a certain level of competence, understanding and motivation to make something with it. And whatever interface you present to the users, be it GUI or text or whatever, there always will be a certain level of complexity that not any random user can master. And this is good, we already see with apple and google what harm we have from too much simplification to cater to the uninteressted.

> No. Logseq / Obsidian have tools that allow end users to build their own coding through templates and queries. The kind of coding is different from scripting, though; it's more like creating semi-automated workflows that put all relevant information in front of the user, which then proceeds to transform it with direct manipulation. What tool in the past has allowed end-users to create that kind of workflows from end-user templates and arbitrary queries, other than non-hierarchical spreadsheets?

Many? What? This is also a kind of scripting, and there is an endless amount of tools enabling people to do that style of scripting. Starting with shellscripts, batchscripts, all the strange scripting-engines. Heck, emacs and has this style as their main purpose established. The data science-sector has a very long history of building such tools on a more professional level and integrating data-views. Wikis and databases have a long history of scripting in the knowledge managment-space. The likes of obsidian are just the next iteration, there are not fundamentally new.

> and spreadsheets are typically not automated through scripting and extensions - using those is normally considered a failure of the spreadsheet model

No, they are? What? People have build all kind of crap with VBA for a very long time. There is a reason why this garbage is still around, getting ported to everywhere. And let's not start with the plugins or how extensions for MS Office are called these days.

> using those is normally considered a failure of the spreadsheet model, because you're processing data outside the mental model of the spreadsheet as a programming environment

Maybe that's our bubbles understanding. Seems the rest of the world doesn't give much here. Limiting yourself to a model is nonsens anyway. No model is ever perfect and satisfying every user.

> That's a red-herring, not a main point. I mentioned multimedia merely because programmable tools tend to be text only, forcing users to use separate tools for rich content.

It's not like obsidian is doing more with them, just because it can play them. Until it understand them can make them accessable for the rest of the system it's remains some fancy gadget.