End-user programming
Also: EUP, end-user development
Letting ordinary people, not just professional developers, instruct computers to do what they need.
End-user programming is the project of putting real computational power in the hands of people who don't call themselves programmers — so they can automate, customise, and create rather than only use what others built.
Its great success story is the spreadsheet: VisiCalc and its descendants turned millions of accountants, scientists, and small-business owners into programmers who would never use that word. Its great unfinished promise is everything else.
The idea is the natural heir of Kay's Dynabook ("children of all ages" authoring, not consuming) and Papert's constructionism. It asks the uncomfortable question at the centre of the future of programming: why, decades on, is instructing a computer still a specialist priesthood?