121–130 of 270 posts
We need to have a conversation about the possible paths to make programming more widely accessible. Chris saw the problem clearly and tried to fix it. Respect. I am most impressed with the number of iterations he was able to crank in the context of a startup. But ultimately a startup may not be the best place to start, because low-end programming is not a short-term growth play. We have to play the long game.
What if programming is just hard?
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> . How many people in the world have the IQ to write a program of say 100 lines that does something useful? Have the IQ necessary? Probably 90-95%. Have the training? Significantly lower. The training required consists of both being taught a language/medium to express thought it, and being taught a structured cause and event method of thinking. There's this incredibly pervasive view in a lot of areas that programmin…
Even assuming that programming is no harder than writing (which I highly doubt), I'm doubtful that 90% of people can write 100 lines of effective prose, even after 16 years of schooling. For what it's worth, I'm not quite sure I could.
As an Angel investor on the Eve project even though I lost my investment, I think that Chris, Robert and the whole team deserve recognition as they changed the whole industry, and now everyone is following them. I am proud to have had the chance to be involved with them!
> as they changed the whole industry Huh? What industry are you talking about? The software development industry? Their influence was not even a rounding error. The let's-rethink-programming-completely industry? No idea, but that's not really an industry.
We need to have a conversation about the possible paths to make programming more widely accessible. Chris saw the problem clearly and tried to fix it. Respect. I am most impressed with the number of iterations he was able to crank in the context of a startup. But ultimately a startup may not be the best place to start, because low-end programming is not a short-term growth play. We have to play the long game.
> We need to have a conversation about the possible paths to make programming more widely accessible. We've been doing this for as long as computers have existed and have made virtually no progress (pun intended) since 3GL languages. No other industry has ever tried as hard as ours has to make itself redundant. Programming is about as simple now as it will be for the foreseeable future, any simplification sacrifices…
Accessible tools and laptops don't make programming any easier than cheap hammers, nail and glue make carpentry easy.
After a while its just you. And that's the biggest thing.
We need to have a conversation about the possible paths to make programming more widely accessible. Chris saw the problem clearly and tried to fix it. Respect. I am most impressed with the number of iterations he was able to crank in the context of a startup. But ultimately a startup may not be the best place to start, because low-end programming is not a short-term growth play. We have to play the long game.
What if programming is just hard?
But the act of programming is not the only thing that a professional programmer needs to do. Understanding requirements, planning development, dealing with the complexity of large systems, communicating -- those are difficult. You don't need to do those things just to program. You can start your own project and build something that most professional people would call a "toy", but is still really satisfying for the average person. There is a limit to how complicated something can get if it is under a few thousand lines of code, and you are the only person working on it.
I find that most movements for simplifying programming are attacking the wrong part of the process. It's fair if you want to make programming more approachable, but it's already very simple. If your goal is to get more people able to do a good job as a professional programmer, then you should concentrate on being able to handle complexity in large systems, or being able to discover and reason about requirements in the system.
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Yeah, people talk about necessary complexity vs unnecessary complexity. "Unnecessary complexity" is all those arcane coding rituals that we do, that our users don't know or care about, but we have to do because our current tools demand it. We can't get rid of necessary complexity and so we probably can't design a programming interface for someone that is completely illiterate in math & logic. But what we can do is 1)…
> "Unnecessary complexity" is all those arcane coding rituals that we do, that our users don't know or care about, but we have to do because our current tools demand it. What exactly do you mean by this? I can think of many things that fit this description but none that don't have good reasons to exist or remain.
This is the same man, Chris Granger, that did a Kickstarter for Light Table, a so-called "next generation IDE," with promotional materials touting as new and revolutionary features that had been standard in IntelliJ, Visual Studio, and even Eclipse for years: http://chrononsystems.com/blog/light-table-concept-vs-realit... Light Table was also ultimately abandoned before completion. Perhaps Granger should rein in his…
Perhaps, but it's pretty easy to make judgements from the sideline about what people should or shouldn't do. I was the PM on Visual Studio. I can assure the things I showed in Light Table weren't there. Nor were they in Eclipse, as I studied that as well. You can pick and choose any number of things from our work over the years and say "Hey, but this looks like that" - I'm sure it does, but the question is does it wo…
Why not try to gradually evolve an existing language or IDE into what you envision, rather than starting completely from scratch? And sorry if I came across as overly snarky and dismissive; that wasn't my intention.
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I think the conversation we should have is why we make everything seem so hard. What a bunch of hooey. In 5th grade everyone talked about how Algebra was hard. When I got to Algebra, it was pretty easy. I was very surprised! Of course my dad had to explain it to me, because my teacher was incapable of explaining it. 10th grade, same thing with calculus. Thank god my dad knew calculus and was patient. Because my teach…
Well, not everyone has the benefits of an educated parent who takes time out of their day to tutor their kids through calculus. Maybe "everything seem so hard" to people without those kinds of advantages.
> because my teacher was incapable of explaining it
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Building bridges is hard. But it's a lot easier now than it was five hundred years ago. There's no general reason to think hard things can't get easier.
Programming is much much easier now than it was in the 80s! It's been years since I actually had to write any code myself - computers do it all for us now. Amazing things, these "compiler" programs.
Certainly true in many respects. However I don't think learning programming is much easier now than it was in the 80s.