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The future is fewer people writing code?

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Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#61

Post by 50CNT »

a_e_k wrote: post #54
50CNT wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And never quite took off.

I think python strikes a good balance, naturalish language whenever possible, without forcing it into places where it doesn't fit. At least that's the feel I got from it.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#63

Post by winstonewert »

n00b101 wrote: post #59
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.

And it is on a whiteboard because it is not useful enough to record in a longer term medium.

I'm not saying diagrams are useless, they just make a poor substitute for syntax.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#64

Post by sievebrain »

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…

That's exactly what Bubble does. Having played with it a bit it seems pretty nice ...basically the latest iteration of tools like Klik & Play or Mediator from the 1990s. You get a visual designer with a few basic widgets, a simple workflow editor that allows for basic sequences of actions and so on. It's programming stripped down to the absolute basics. You get a database, a simple visual query builder thingie that vaguely resembles English, etc.

I just showed it to my girlfriend who is learning Python. Her comment was "hmm but is this really easier than learning to code"? Well, it probably IS a lot easier, as long as your app fits within the constraints of what Bubble can do.

The problem with such tools is always that you very quickly hit the limits of what they can do, and then you're stuck. You can't easily peel back the abstraction and go deeper. You end up having to scrap the project or just give up on certain things. Bubble's "language" can't do looping, for instance. You can apparently write snippets of Javascript to do other stuff, but then you're back to needing to learn programming again.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#65

Post by nickbauman »

ewzimm wrote: post #57
nickbauman wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As long as we're criticizing the analogies in the discussion (rather than the actual arguments) I'd say the hours spent do not have a consistent quality vis-a-vis solving hard problems. Because there are more absolute hours available does not mean that there are more hours available for solving hard AI problems. There are very likely less. And there has been virtually NO progress on the hard AI front.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#66

Post by xigency »

Kinnard wrote: post #12

> 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. Someone is going to have to right the code so that the end-user can just click buttons. So if this future of programmatic interfaces is coming, it's going to require more people writing code to build it— not fewer!

Just point to the button and select a shade of being able to point at the button and click a color. (Yes, that is confusing.)

I don't think the author or the person interviewed has used Visual Basic, or understands why a developer might not want that.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#67

Post by gerbilly »

Think of the the other time when people want to be precise: contracts.

Contracts are written down in text, so they can be edited, carefully read and referred to later.

He might as well also say, that in the future there will be no written contracts, we'll go back to debating and settling our issues verbally in public.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#68

Post by paavokoya »

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.

>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

Yeah and it took "us" 60 years from discovering flight to landing a rocket on the moon. Took "us" 60 years from the first computer to globally-live video streaming in your pocket. Time is a pointless metric when it comes to technology. You don't know what someone is cooking up down in some basement somewhere that will be released tomorrow and shatter your concept of reality.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#69

Post by beachstartup »

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…

for some perspective... 50 years is just twice the length of time since i've been coding (in some capacity)... and i'm only in my early 30's.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#70

Post by AnimalMuppet »

markbnj wrote: post #39
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…

Not all nuts are crackable. I agree, though, that people will continue to pound. Even if it doesn't crack, we may find a way for many people to get things done without learning to write "production" code.
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