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The future is fewer people writing code?

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Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#71

Post by slededit »

pmlnr wrote: post #22
xxs wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you missed assembler; it's still a thing

I did miss that, true; however, Assembly is heavily architecture-tied. Therefore x86 Assembly significantly differs from, for example, ARM assembly, but nonetheless I should have mentioned it.

Its annoyingly incompatible and RISC is more verbose but really the concepts are pretty much the same. Load something to a register, do some very basic operations on said registers and save it out. An X86 programmer should be able to pick up other CPUs fairly easily. Although delay slots will probably piss them off every time.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#72

Post by rayiner »

ewzimm wrote: post #48
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…

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…

Your example actually cuts the other way. Imagine it's 1966 and someone tells you that the cars, trains, and planes will "have to be dramatically different in 50 years," yet lo and behold a trip from NYC to LA takes about the same amount of time now as it did back then and the Northeast Regional is a hair slower than the Metroliner used to be.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#73

Post by whack »

The writer presents an ideal vision for the future - one where people can "build software" purely through abstract thought, without needing to know the semantics of specific tools and programming languages.

If such a future is possible, that would be great. I would be all for it. But the people who are already in the field, working in the trenches, don't think it's a realistic vision for the near future. All attempts thus far to produce "layman friendly programming" have been either failures, or relegated to non-functional toys. Hence why we don't want to waste our scarce time and resources on such moonshots.

If the author and his peers disagree, they are free to found/invest in such ventures. And if they're right, they can make a fortune for themselves in the process. But just sitting in the sidelines and armchair quarterbacking is a pointless waste of time for everyone involved.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#75

Post by AnimalMuppet »

mrob wrote: post #46
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")

Inform 7 is a programming language that looks similar to natural English. As far as I can tell the only benefit is tricking beginners into thinking it's easy. By the time they figure out it's a normal programming language only with extra verbose syntax, it's too late, they're already a programmer. If we had a real natural language based programming language it would have all the problems of law. Laws are written in a…

For a previous attempt at the same idea, see COBOL. The original design goal was to make professional programming obsolete.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#76

Post by xeromal »

nickbauman wrote: post #65
ewzimm wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Analogies are always a rabbit hole. Haha.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#77

Post by AnimalMuppet »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #18

I remember going to a mobile conference in the early 2000s and every single vendor there was saying that developing mobile apps using UML was the future. No code, just map out everything in a diagram. Granted a smart phone was unheard of at this point so most mobile apps wouldn't even be called apps by today's standards. A decade and a half later and mobile developer is a highly skilled _coding_ position.

And UML is... well, maybe not dead, but nobody thinks it's going to replace coding.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#78

Post by cglee »

Iv wrote: post #34
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.

drivers:users::mechanics:programmers
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