Was it just me or did the talk not actually cover "The Future of Programming"?
It covered the future of programming from the point of view of the past.
The Future of Programming (2013)
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Re: The Future of Programming (2013)
#12One of my all-time favorite talks. The IT industry is pretty bad in general at knowing what problems have previously been solved.
In many cases, we have to first acknowledge that the problem exists before we attempt to apply some of these solutions. I've noticed myself seeing solutions to problems that I didn't know I had, only to brush off the solution as though it were only an interesting curiosity with no real practical use. It was years later when I went back to that and realized how useful it could have been.
Re: The Future of Programming (2013)
#13Is anyone working on these problems, or did people just give up? It's crazy to think that the way we create and consume software barely changed since the 60s/70s.
Commercialization and commoditization: "Why make things better when people don't care?"
Re: The Future of Programming (2013)
#14Was it just me or did the talk not actually cover "The Future of Programming"?
It was about "the future of programming" as it should have (or could have) been, as seen from the 70s.
"These are some good ideas. It would be kind of a shame if in 40 years [ie, today] we're still coding in procedures in text files in a sequential programming model. That would suggest we didn't learn anything from this really fertile period of computer science [...] The real tragedy would be if people forgot you could have new ideas about programming models in the first place."
"Once you grow up with dogma, it's really hard to break out of it".
Re: The Future of Programming (2013)
#15Is anyone working on these problems, or did people just give up? It's crazy to think that the way we create and consume software barely changed since the 60s/70s.
We consume software very differently, because the we includes people like us...by which I mean that statistically to many decimal places nobody had access to software in the 1960's and in the 1970's the people who had access to software were all out in the long tail of standard deviations of a Bell Curve.
In terms of creating software, in the 1960's most was being written in Assembly and if it was written in a higher level language that language almost certainly contained a large proportion of vendor specific instructions or was entirely proprietary or machine specific. That didn't change much in the 1970's and it was only at the end of the 1980's that language standards could practically mean portable code across vendors and platforms.
Re: The Future of Programming (2013)
#16Is anyone working on these problems, or did people just give up? It's crazy to think that the way we create and consume software barely changed since the 60s/70s.
Some of it even got worse.
Outside AT&T walls, strong type systems programming did actually exist.
And here are we now still looking towards to somehow fix it, and it will take several generations.
Re: The Future of Programming (2013)
#17One of my all-time favorite talks. The IT industry is pretty bad in general at knowing what problems have previously been solved.
Yeah. Almost every time I watch a Marvin Minsky or Alan Kay video of any kind I'm surprised with info on some awesome technology or research from the 60s or 70s.
I think you'll like the discussion he had at CMU a few years back, which focused a lot on the technology side of things https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFc379hu--8
Re: The Future of Programming (2013)
#18One of my all-time favorite talks. The IT industry is pretty bad in general at knowing what problems have previously been solved.
This was one of my professors favorite gripes. He loved to tell stories about how companies would reinvent algorithms (usually multiple times) that had been published in the 70's and 80's
Re: The Future of Programming (2013)
#19Is anyone working on these problems, or did people just give up? It's crazy to think that the way we create and consume software barely changed since the 60s/70s.
Yeah it's definitely crazy! A few people are working on this from different angles. There is research https://harc.ycr.org/project/realtalk/, side projects that explore Jupyter notebook like programming environments: https://www.maria.cloud/intro, or https://www.runkit.com; my team and I are working on https://www.clay.run: making it easier to prototype by allowing developers to write code that is instantly running without setup or configuration and 'fork' other people's code to have your own running copy.
Re: The Future of Programming (2013)
#20Bret Victor is now at HARC (https://harc.ycr.org/member/) which has an interesting list of projects.