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The future is fewer people writing code?

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Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#51

Post by 50CNT »

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.

Concentrating on the "our language" part, we could probably create something that changes setting based on natural language. You'd say

    Turn the color of button3 in pane4 red
Which would be equivalent to

    pane4.button3.color = 'red'
Which is...actually a bit shorter, and a lot more precise. Who'd have thought. CSS is actually pretty close, descriptive and all.

    #pane4 #button3 { color:red;}
Neat coincidence on the number of WYSIWYG editors too.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#52

Post by lern_too_spel »

lnanek2 wrote: post #35

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…

The difference is that Bloks isn't a service that can be shut down. It's essentially a set of open source schematics.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#54

Post by a_e_k »

50CNT wrote: post #51
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.

Concentrating on the "our language" part, we could probably create something that changes setting based on natural language. You'd say Turn the color of button3 in pane4 red Which would be equivalent to pane4.button3.color = 'red' Which is...actually a bit shorter, and a lot more precise. Who'd have thought. CSS is actually pretty close, descriptive and all. #pane4 #button3 { color:red;} Neat coincidence on the numbe…

The "natural language" programming thing has been done a few times. HyperTalk comes to mind for one example.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#55

Post by circlefavshape »

tribune wrote: post #10

"...so why are we having a serious conversation about grooming children to become software developers before they’ve even gone to middle school?" We're not, really, but given the pervasiveness of computing technology we're recognizing that it's important for children to have some formal experience with software design concepts regardless of which career path they choose. I'm a firm believer that at least some coding…

This. Whether or not we need more professional devs is beside the point. At coder dojos, for example, they're not teaching design patterns, they're teaching the basics - assignment, loops, conditionals - the kinds of things that allow you to automate computation in other fields of endeavour

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#56

Post by meira »

Well, I disagree. When I started to program, in 2000, it was só easy that a child 12 years old could do (HTML,php,ftp). Although anyone can deploy something online today, I doubt it's só easy for a 12 years old kid to learn something similar to what I used, like React, node and git.

Editado: conclusion, programming is becoming harder, not easier.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#57

Post by ewzimm »

nickbauman wrote: post #50
ewzimm wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't necessarily judge the future of of a technology by its past. Consider transportation. Imagine it's 1936, automobiles have been around for 50 years, but there are still plenty of people getting around by horse. Some people are claiming that in another 50 years, by 1986, horses will be hardly used for transportation compared to cars, other people say that horses have been used for thousands of years, there's…

There are currently no signs that what you think will happen will happen. Soft AI is the only place where anything is moving on that front and the movement is infinitesimally small. Here's an analogy for you: It took more than 1000 years (from Babylon to Archaic Greece) for us to go from writing with only consonants to using vowels for the first time.

Years don't make progress on their own, people working during those years push progress forward. The estimated population of ancient Babylon at its height was 200,000. Let's imagine that 1% of them were working on developing writing for at leat 2 hours every week and that those who came after them were able to maintain that level of work for 1000 years until ancient Greece, over 200 million hours of work. That's less time than the official Gangnam Style video has been watched on YouTube.

In 50 years, 99%+ of all the work ever done by civilization will be done after 2016.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#58

Post by 50CNT »

This article strokes me the wrong way. If any of the things described in there were possible, why the hell would I be writing any code? I'm a lazy programmer for gods sake, and code I don't have to write is a win in my book.

Matter of fact, once I got past the point where the novelty of writing lots of code wore off, I'm spending most of my time trying to write less code.

That side step all these miracle solutions for bringing coding to the masses in one fell swoop and eliminating its tedium do is that "Hey, technically, if you draw pictures instead, it doesn't count as writing". Yes, technically true, totally useless. I personally believe that whoever comes up with this again and again deserves to be bludgeoned by a copy of "K&R The C Programming language", turned into a picture book. All 70,000 pages of of it, with the big glossy full-page, double-page foldout prints.

/rant

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#59

Post by n00b101 »

winstonewert wrote: post #40

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…

> Diagrams suck

And yet anytime two or more programmers get together to talk about what they are creating, they start drawing diagrams on whiteboards.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#60

Post by bbctol »

malux85 wrote: post #26
dkopi wrote: post #15

"The future I imagine is a world in which programming is self-explanatory, where people talk to computers to build software. To get there, programming tools should first use our language." But is: "For every button on the page that is a "warning" button, replace the background color to red." Necessarily better than? $("button.warning").css("background-color", "red")

Yes - it's miles better. If you're unconciously competant (i.e. good at your job) they might seem like they both take about the same cognitive effort to understand. But think for a beginner: What is $ ? Is it money? What are () for? What is CSS? I want to shade it, so lets do background-shade .. oh, color only works, so you have to know all the terms. Can I do "background-color" "red blue white striped" What is butto…

The questions raised was "better," not "easier to learn." In absence of everything else, being easy to learn is a point in favor of natural language--but the inefficiencies, ambiguities, and probable weakness of using natural language are big marks against it. Checkers is easier to learn than chess, but has fewer players.
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