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The future is fewer people writing code?

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Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#91

Post by dasil003 »

Non-programmers make this mistake all the time: thinking that the syntax is the hard part of programming.

No, the hard part of programming is understanding in very specific and rigid details how to accomplish a task. What the author doesn't realize is the enormous amount of processing power, shared culture and empathy that goes into human interaction.

Even mighty Google doesn't have the compute power or the architecture to replicate this. Until computers can understand humans at a human-level this will not be possible. Several breakthroughs will be necessary, and even still I expect decades/centuries before it happens if it even happens. Essentially we're talking about the Singularity.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#92

Post by hackguru »

There is an upper bound limit for how abstract a general purpose programming language can become. Programming languages mainly exist because of their ability to remove ambiguity. Our natural language on the other hand is very vague. Many people might read the same exact article and interpret it differently. This is natural language's great feature. This feature is why a kid, without fully formed thoughts, can learn and use a natural language. Hence I don't see a day programming languages will completely fade away. Programs are result of a careful thought process that cristalizes a concept into a process and that process is only complete when you can describe it in an unambiguous language. One may argue that natural languages are capable of being not ambiguous. A subset of a natural language can be used without ambiguity but that is just definition of a programming language. Arguing programming languages will fade away is the same as saying math one day will not be necessary because we can explain all concepts in physics or other sciences in natural language.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#93

Post by noobermin »

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…

I've said this before, the reason code and CLI and texting and messaging all these text based modes of communicating and controlling computers are still popular is that they mirror one of the most intuitive and fundamental inventions humans have ever created: language, specifically, written language. Even speech doesn't rival written word in some contexts; for example, laws and organization rules, policies, are still written.

You can't beat written word. Corps are not lining up to rewrite their bylaws in a bunch of connected drag-and-droppable blocks. I really don't think it's just inertia, the preciseness, versatility,and ease of examination and editing, and permanence of written language is hard to beat. Same with source code.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#95

Post by justinlardinois »

Is "computational thinking" really something that isn't already being taught in schools? There's a link to an article that spends three pages defining it: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~15110-s13/Wing06-ct.pdf

It alludes to computer science, but really it just boils down to solving problems by breaking them into parts. In other words, problem solving skills. It doesn't sound like anything special to me.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#96

Post by davorb »

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.

> for us to go from writing with only consonants to using vowels for the first time

Speaking as someone who has studied cuneiform and Akkadian, I would say that this claim isn't true. Here's a vowel that predates the period that you mentioned[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_(cuneiform)

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#97

Post by bdrool »

dasil003 wrote: post #91

Non-programmers make this mistake all the time: thinking that the syntax is the hard part of programming. No, the hard part of programming is understanding in very specific and rigid details how to accomplish a task. What the author doesn't realize is the enormous amount of processing power, shared culture and empathy that goes into human interaction. Even mighty Google doesn't have the compute power or the architect…

> Non-programmers make this mistake all the time: thinking that the syntax is the hard part of programming.

Programmers make it all the time too, or at least something very similar. See all those people who are on the endless quest for the "perfect" language, which usually means one which allows for writing the shortest code, sometimes at a very high cognitive cost for very little payoff. No, I really don't want to do a massive amount of mental backflips just to save a few characters, thanks.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#98

Post by seangrogg »

mattnewton wrote: post #2

I don't know if I agree with the author since they didn't seem to provide any evidence / argument for why the future is codeless. They did warn me though that I wouldn't be able to understand from my vantage point in Silicon Valley though so maybe other people see the argument? But from my perspective code is only growing without showing signs of abating.

Another SV resident, I can understand given WYSIWYG tools and CMS like WordPress it would "only seem logical" that eventually nobody needs to code and we just magically make things work.

I think the problem with that assumption is that there has been virtually no traction on "just telling the computer what to do" - whether text or voice. There is also the assumption that programming is not getting more difficult. While not everyone is working on "capital E" engineering efforts, it's a bit ridiculous to think that our jobs are getting easier to automate in the wake of Internet of Things, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and projects like Web Assembly pushing browser-based development into interesting, new places.

Just because we made it easy to set up a blog doesn't mean we made it easy to "program with words".

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