Oh don't mistake me for an anti-Excel snob, I'm absolutely a fan of it, and I believe learning spreadsheets should be as mandated a school course as typing...I also think that even the basic application of cell-based formulas counts as programming...which, well, makes sense given that it's also math.

Again, I don't want to be too harsh on what the OP excerpts as I'm not sure if Eve's ultimate intent is to just make programming more accessible to non-programmers...but from how I interpret the original announcement, Eve is pushing the notion that the hard computational problems can be approached by anyone, if it weren't for that programming hurdle:

> Imagine a world where everyone has access to computation without having to become a professional programmer - where a scientist doesn’t have to rely on the one person in the lab who knows python, where a child could come up with an idea for a game and build it in a couple of weekends, where your computer can help you organize and plan your wedding/vacation/business. A world where programmers could focus on solving the hard problems without being weighed down by the plumbing. That is the world we want to live in. That is the world we want to help create with Eve.

http://www.chris-granger.com/2014/10/01/beyond-light-table/

For starters, some of that is already realizable. Does anyone doubt that GameMaker is a legit platform after the success of Spelunky? I haven't used it but I've heard it billed sometimes as a way to make games without coding. However...AFAIK, Spelunky and other big hits were most definitely not constructed solely through a drag-and-drop editor. In other words, making something truly fun and unique requires programming, because programming is as explicit a medium for us to communicate our commands and creativity to a machine.

To refer back to the Eve announcement, to that scientist who has to rely on the sole Pythonista to get some kind of task done...why shouldn't the ambition be that that scientist learns some Python? Why is programming seen as some dirty work relegated to the lab nerd with an obsessive interest in closures and indentation, instead of being integral to the scientific process?

To use another analogy, in the world of journalism, it is possible to be a fantastic reporter -- the kind who knows how to seek stories, sources, ask the tough questions, understand the important issues, etc. -- and be a horrible, horrible writer. And vice versa. And yet it would be unheard of to hire a great investigative journalist who was functionally illiterate...it's not as if that journalist couldn't just focus on the reporting and then dictate his findings to a writer. But besides the inefficiency of hiring two people just to get a story in written form...there is something most definitely lost when the reporter/observer of facts and events is not the same person who is structuring the narrative and arrangement of facts and events. If you've ever been heavily edited, you know what I mean.

And to address the example of "A world where programmers could focus on solving the hard problems without being weighed down by the plumbing"...maybe I'm just very narrowminded and have turned into the prototypical code-nerd...but it's hard to think of many hard software engineering problems that didn't involve plumbing. The reality of programming is that it almost always deals with very mundane, boring, pedantic work...but isn't that the point? That the programmer's main worth is to be able to succinctly and efficiently translate and delegate that work to a machine, so that the programmer (and the rest of society) can move on to more complex things?