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The future is fewer people writing code?

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Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#31

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

pmlnr wrote: post #6

“50 years from now, I can’t imagine people programming as we do today. It just can’t be." Dear writer, let me introduce you to FORTRAN, COBOL, LISP, or BASIC. These are alive languages, all 50+ years old. Coding didn't change much. The languages, the methodologies, the ideas change, but the approach is the same, and whoever thinks this will soon (50 years is not _that_ far) changes, have never had to debug something…

The actual practice of writing programs is, a few outliers aside, incredibly different in 2016 as compared to 1966.

(And even just looking at languages, Fortran 2008 is hardly recognizable as compared to FORTRAN IV)

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#32

Post by buckbova »

laggyluke wrote: post #19
throwaway2016a wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but web developers still tend to do it the "hard way" but editing the CSS directly. Why do web developers still do it that way even though visual tools exist? My guess is because with working with text is more efficient. The cognitive load of finding a setting in the UI, moving your mouse to it, and selecting the value is far greater than just typing.

Text can be version controlled and diffed.

And so can IDE generated code from drag and drop controls.

Visual Studio and many others have this out of the box but there's plenty of companies that do well selling exactly this like telerik.

I personally don't and been doing it the "hard way" since the beginning because it feels less confining. And I don't want to rely on an IDE to build something. Plus the code it generates was always kind of kludgy.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#33

Post by warfangle »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #13
buckbova wrote: post #5

> To get there, programming tools should first use our language. For instance, to turn a button red, we shouldn’t have to write code. We should just be able to point to the button and select a shade of red. We've had that for over twenty years.

Yeah but web developers still tend to do it the "hard way" but editing the CSS directly. Why do web developers still do it that way even though visual tools exist? My guess is because with working with text is more efficient. The cognitive load of finding a setting in the UI, moving your mouse to it, and selecting the value is far greater than just typing.

Why do people still build business process tools when they could point and click in Salesforce?

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#34

Post by Iv »

pmlnr wrote: post #6

“50 years from now, I can’t imagine people programming as we do today. It just can’t be." Dear writer, let me introduce you to FORTRAN, COBOL, LISP, or BASIC. These are alive languages, all 50+ years old. Coding didn't change much. The languages, the methodologies, the ideas change, but the approach is the same, and whoever thinks this will soon (50 years is not _that_ far) changes, have never had to debug something…

50 years from now, I can't imagine people driving cars as we do today. I do know that human-operated cars are old, but it does not mean that we can't do better nowadays.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#35

Post by lnanek2 »

If it was another company doing this, there might be a chance it is meaningful. Google is not that company, however. They started and killed visual programming projects before, dumping everyone's data. The last one was called App Inventor. At least they made the code open source so MIT could write App Inventor 2 based on it. The best thing they could do to make me think Project Bloks will be meaningful is to give it to another company in a similar fashion. Otherwise I expect they would just kill it next year anyway like other projects of theirs.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#36

Post by Pfhreak »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #13
buckbova wrote: post #5

> To get there, programming tools should first use our language. For instance, to turn a button red, we shouldn’t have to write code. We should just be able to point to the button and select a shade of red. We've had that for over twenty years.

Yeah but web developers still tend to do it the "hard way" but editing the CSS directly. Why do web developers still do it that way even though visual tools exist? My guess is because with working with text is more efficient. The cognitive load of finding a setting in the UI, moving your mouse to it, and selecting the value is far greater than just typing.

Why do people play D&D instead of WoW?

Perhaps, in part, because one allows for a greater expressiveness -- albeit with a little more planning and cognitive load.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#37

Post by ISL »

Are there graphical languages that advocates like?

The only graphical language that I've encountered professionally is LabVIEW, and I've yet to see an instance/programming style where it has been superior for anything but quick prototyping.

A language that's editable in both flowchart and traditional formats could be very useful, if executed in a way that doesn't cripple the traditional side of things.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#38

Post by ksk »

pmlnr wrote: post #6

“50 years from now, I can’t imagine people programming as we do today. It just can’t be." Dear writer, let me introduce you to FORTRAN, COBOL, LISP, or BASIC. These are alive languages, all 50+ years old. Coding didn't change much. The languages, the methodologies, the ideas change, but the approach is the same, and whoever thinks this will soon (50 years is not _that_ far) changes, have never had to debug something…

>Doing that with voice commands in my opinion is significantly harder compared to what we have now.

You could have automations around that though. A lot of manual work could be replaced with little AI bots that do the work. And since this work is not really "creative", it could be done through AI.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#39

Post by markbnj »

pmlnr wrote: post #6

“50 years from now, I can’t imagine people programming as we do today. It just can’t be." Dear writer, let me introduce you to FORTRAN, COBOL, LISP, or BASIC. These are alive languages, all 50+ years old. Coding didn't change much. The languages, the methodologies, the ideas change, but the approach is the same, and whoever thinks this will soon (50 years is not _that_ far) changes, have never had to debug something…

>> We will have tools, accessible, easy tools; Arduinos and Pis of the future; sure. But it will not replace, nor eliminate or reduce the amount of code written.

I think something eventually will, though. My reasoning for this conclusion is simply that I don't believe a significantly larger percentage of people will learn to write production software than are able to do so now. At the same time the need for software in every sector continues to grow, leading to some varying levels of scarcity in programmers. That's a massive economic opportunity, and so people will continue to pound at that nut until it cracks.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#40

Post by winstonewert »

Dear article writer,

Natural language sucks, it is amibigious, difficult to manipulate, verbose, and have too many non-functional degrees of freedom. After all, that's why mathematics left natural language and adopted the mathematical syntax we have today.

Diagrams suck, they are ambigious, difficult to manipulate, verbose, and has too many non-functional degrees of freedom. That's why cook books don't have diagrams to describe recipies.

The syntax will never die, it is the only sensible we have to define programs.

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