251–260 of 270 posts
This is very sad. I’ve been looking for something like Eve to develop difficult user interfaces in and was hoping it would hit 1.0. Wonder if there is any framework trying to do similar things in the JavaScript ecosystem, or targeting that ecosystem with code generation.
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> Graduate school is a great place for "people testing the fringes." Testing, yes, but not exploring. Grad school gives you one experiment and then you have to start publishing. So if you have something you want to try out, with a direct implementation strategy and a clear set of possible outcomes, then you can do that at grad school. If you want to try many things and iterate, grad school will not work well. You wil…
Isn't the freedom from short term value basically the concept behind tenure?
But if you want students, you need to find grants for them. And if you need materials/travel/services/etc for your research that’ll require grants too.
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Where? The state of the art today of - debugging - code browsing, system exploration - customizable, modular, non-textual user interfaces* - immediate feedback after code changes - non-textual programming is * not necessarily visual programming. Look at the Genera Lisp OS or Plan 9 for example.
Languages: Swift, Go, Rust, Julia, Haskell, JS, C++ etc etc Dev envs: VSCode, Electron, more build systems than you can shake a stick at, VMs, containers, playgrounds etc Non-textual programming. For general purpose programming, I can't think of any. There are some dead ends that will probably remain so. For niche programming, there are loads. And to my point, Lisp, Smalltalk and Plan 9 are all good examples of faile…
[1] The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal. Mitchell Waldrop.
[2] Founder School Session: The Future Doesn't Have to Be Incremental https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o
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> 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…
Ultron, Hawkeye, and Iron Man are fictional characters. It’s easy to imagine an omnipotent programming AI, but we have no reason to believe any such thing could exist.
Regardless, that programming is so unaugmented while other expert engineering fields are much better is shameful to the entire profession.
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Would you mind taking a look at https://github.com/stefanhaustein/codechat ? WDYT?
Can't try on an Android right now, did watch the YouTube and looked at the examples. First, it looks awesome. You should do a Show HN sooner than later. Having a few decades of experience under my belt, I'm sure I'm blind to some things newcomers/starters would see, but what I did notice: - Camel case is bad for mobile typing, and bad for non-coders in my experience; underscore is better for the latter but not for mo…
Case sensitivity: I'd prefer to make the language case-insensitive (or at least avoid uppercase in anything builtin), but then I'd need some other way to distinguish types and other identifiers. Any suggestions? There is already an issue for this: https://github.com/stefanhaustein/codechat/issues/1
Blocks: I was using {} before but it was inconvenient on mobile. Significant indent also seemed tricky. So I went for this combination for now.
let vs. variable: let declares a constant. Typing effort for let vs. variable is on purpose O:)
The #number syntax is for identifying specific instances if they are not explicitly named. Makes sure editing an "on x" trigger replaces it (opposed to adding another one).
Assignment syntax: Will change to := as suggested.
Variable value display: Will add "something" to do this.
I wasn't familiar with Atari VCS 2600 BASIC, but I must admit that my first programming language was (Spectrum) BASIC and I am trying to avoid some of the issues I found confusing in 1983 O:)
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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…
> Have the training? Significantly lower. And the majority of people are not autodidacts so they need somebody to teach them. The business side of our department are heavy Excel users and yet only a few can use Macros/VB properly and those people are in huge demand.
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> a practically-attainable real-world solution. I can't be understanding this correctly. Please expand, I fear otherwise this is going to be at the back of my mind all day.
If you are a parent with a school-aged child, and you want to fix a deficiency you perceive in calculus education, it's easier to get strong at calculus and teach your child yourself than it is to reform the education establishment.
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Ultron, Hawkeye, and Iron Man are fictional characters. It’s easy to imagine an omnipotent programming AI, but we have no reason to believe any such thing could exist.
It is only a matter of when, like practical nuclear fusion. We know it is possible in theory. Regardless, that programming is so unaugmented while other expert engineering fields are much better is shameful to the entire profession.
Omnipotent AI is not a theory. There’s no evidence it is possible. I have yet to even see a a falsifiable hypothesis about how it could come about. The most advanced hypotheses are something along the lines of “they’re getting smarter do eventually they’ll be infinity smart” which is not a strong claim.
Evidence suggests intelligence is niche specific. Humans are smart, but in the middle of the ocean a jellyfish is smarter. A better prediction about AI is they will surpass us in some ways and not others.
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It is only a matter of when, like practical nuclear fusion. We know it is possible in theory. Regardless, that programming is so unaugmented while other expert engineering fields are much better is shameful to the entire profession.
No, we don’t. Nuclear fusion is a theory, there is evidence it is possible. We can observe it by looking at the stars. Omnipotent AI is not a theory. There’s no evidence it is possible. I have yet to even see a a falsifiable hypothesis about how it could come about. The most advanced hypotheses are something along the lines of “they’re getting smarter do eventually they’ll be infinity smart” which is not a strong cla…
That's not what was suggested. Human-level intelligence is sufficient to cause a singularity (because then they can start improving their own programs).
> better prediction about AI is they will surpass us in some ways and not others.
That isn't a better prediction at all. Regardless, it is uninteresting to my original point, which is we want to live in the Iron Man, not Ultron, phase now anyways.
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> "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.
In the 80's, you would turn on your C-64 or ZX-Spectrum or Oric-1 or Dragon-32 or Atari 800, and type: PRINT "This is nice" and it would. Then, you would type: 10 FOR I=1 TO 10 20 PRINT "This works too! Number ",I 30 NEXT I 40 GOTO 10 And it would. Today, you go to your computer and ... open an IDE, define a project, pick your Java environment, select "file new", write some random incantation of "public static void m…
On another note
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