Note that as is mentioned on the website, this has indeed been tested on users, and the results of the study have gone through rigorous peer review and published at a top tier academic conference on HCI.
And yes, the audience is programming novices who do know HTML and CSS. For now. Since Mavo is a language, one can easily imagine an integration with a visual editor, to make it accessible to the average Joe.
Spreadsheets have function calls as well, and yet non-programmers can use them. We don't care about making a theoretically pure distinction, we care about making something that non-programmers can actually use.
Nope. There were many people around, and it was clear that he didn’t know all of them. There were people he didn't know just as close as I was. He apologized only to me, nobody else.
“Just don’t have a bias”. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. The problem is that it’s very hard to know when biases are affecting your decisions. You cannot just decide to not have them.
Agreed though that fighting bias with bias is not a solution. What is the solution then? I don’t know. :(
FOUC? It's only some CSS3 that won't display until DOM load, not the whole styling. As for the performance, I'm pretty sure you're just guessing, and haven't done any testing.