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The future is fewer people writing code?

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Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#111

Post by douche »

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…

I used to mess around a bit with Inform 6 (they had a really excellent tutorial[1]). It wasn't great, but since it was basically C-like with some extra DSL stuff sprinkled on top, you could usually figure out what it was doing without too much effort.

I tried to get into Inform 7, but the natural language syntax was so fuzzy, I was constantly trying to figure out how things worked and how I had to write things down to get the results I was trying to get.

EDIT: Since guess-the-verb was sometimes half the battle with old Infocom games, I suppose its ironically fitting that the experience of writing IF with Inform 7 parallels that experience.

[1] http://inform-fiction.org/manual/about_ibg.html

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#112

Post by ktRolster »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #75
mrob wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Applescript is worth looking at for the same reasons.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#113

Post by metheus »

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…

I just had a waking nightmare of AppleScript.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#114

Post by ktRolster »

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.

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.

UML in later versions got so bad that even the original creators disowned it. Turned out that putting everything into a diagram was just as hard (and less convenient) than writing it as code.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#115

Post by maxxxxx »

bdrool wrote: post #97
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 d…

Or learning one javscript framework after the other where you do the same thing with different syntax.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#116

Post by ktRolster »

spotman wrote: post #24

Maybe an unpopular opinion here, but I agree with the article overall. My view is less that programming is going away, and more that all jobs are. Not immediately or anything, but I don't think we are going to magically produce programming jobs for all the masses who are going to need a job. Having been at this over 15 years I have single handedly automated thousands of jobs, and of those a healthy handful are making…

Programming is the new carpentry. Probably jobs for a long time , but training the children now like it's going to be the most amazing career path is short sighted I think.

Train your children to think. Give them the freedom to change career paths if necessary.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#117

Post by ktRolster »

meira wrote: post #56

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.

programming is becoming harder, not easier.

So true. I'm not sure why, it shouldn't be that way.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#118

Post by maxxxxx »

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.

I have been doing coding for twenty years now and I am kind of surprised that plain text is still the best representation of code.

Re: The future is fewer people writing code?

#120

Post by hackguru »

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…

What do you mean by computers handling ambiguity? At the end of the day for a idea to become cristalized it needs to be free from ambiguity. That is the case even in human interactions. When using ambiguous language, we iterate over ideas together to make sure everybody is on the same page. If by handling ambiguity, you mean that computers can go back and forth with us to help us remove ambiguity from our thoughts then they are basically helping us think or in some sense do programming for us. That is a great future indeed! A future where actually AIs are doing the programming in long run! But with this line of thought we might as well not teach anything to our kids because one day computers will do it better. Specially if we already stablished that they can think better than us :)
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