Lots of commenters here are failing to see past the snarky (in my opinion, tongue-in-cheek) tone and missing the greater point, which isn't a fundamentally new idea, but is always worth revisiting for discussion:
How can we remove as much yak-shaving as possible, so that a person who can understand logic can use it to make computers do things without first learning a bunch of esoteric knowledge required to get the ball rolling? How can we make more Excels?
I think the idea of including a real, accessible, coding environment in a popular web browser is a pretty neat one, if for no other reason than the fact that everyone has a web browser and generally knows how to use it. It would open things up for a very large number of people. Like the author, I doubt Google would ever do this, but it's fun to think about.
Counter-argument here is that what the author wants already widely exists. There's a ton of one-stop "install this app & start coding!" apps out there. Someone wants one of those for node.js, sure, knock yourself out, go for it. It'd be just one of a dozen such apps, not a new concept, and not unexplored territory.
But the authors request that this is built into the browser seems insane to me. Why would we bloat browsers with unnecessary stuff just to avoid hitting an app store, which is also extremely user-friendly? It's literally a request for bundled bloatware. No, hell no.
A big part of why BASIC took off with "non-programmers" (for a while) is that it was bundled on every DOS/Windows install. The same is true of Excel: people already have it and are using it, so they just organically start learning the more advanced things you can do with it, and before long they're basically programming.
We aren't talking about people who make a concerted decision to "go find and install a tool for programming", and who just don't want to put in the effort to learn the "real tools". We're talking about people who would never think of themselves as programmers in the first place. I think you underestimate the significance of the small barriers, even ones as small as a search-and-install step.
I do think it would be silly to drop Node into Chrome wholesale, since the bulk of Node is V8, which is the JS engine Chrome already includes. But what about a version of the JS console that's designed to be exposed to everyday users, for interaction with the sites they use every day? What about a button on the New Tab screen for opening an interactive web dev space similar to CodePen, which can trivially save the resulting files to the local file system (and load projects from there)? They could re-use most of the GUI components from the existing Sources tab in the dev tools. What if it included a preconfigured (simplified) reactive front-end framework so people could get started making custom GUIs? Something like this: https://mavo.io/
> I think you underestimate the significance of the small barriers, even ones as small as a search-and-install step.
I think you over-estimate that barrier. It hasn't stopped things like TikTok, Instagram, etc... The modern world is installing apps. It's not a meaningful barrier.
What you're describing with organic evolution into programming is a cool property of things like Excel, yes. But you don't get that by just bundling an IDE into a browser, either. You still have that barrier of the user needs to decide they want to program. Which they don't want to do when they're just browsing reddit or whatever, that's not a natural evolution path like the Excel one.
How can we remove as much yak-shaving as possible, so that a person who can understand logic can use it to make computers do things without first learning a bunch of esoteric knowledge required to get the ball rolling? How can we make more Excels?
I think the idea of including a real, accessible, coding environment in a popular web browser is a pretty neat one, if for no other reason than the fact that everyone has a web browser and generally knows how to use it. It would open things up for a very large number of people. Like the author, I doubt Google would ever do this, but it's fun to think about.