As people flock to become programmers, as a population we will become increasingly technologically literate. Sooner or later we will enter an age where programming is as second nature as writing. Communication at the end of the day is a way to get people to understand what we want. Programming is very similar only directed at machines, and as machines continue to replace people in trivial (and not so trivial) tasks, that will be the lingua franca. And yes, it will be javascript.
Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
41–50 of 194 posts
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
#42As people flock to become programmers, as a population we will become increasingly technologically literate. Sooner or later we will enter an age where programming is as second nature as writing. Communication at the end of the day is a way to get people to understand what we want. Programming is very similar only directed at machines, and as machines continue to replace people in trivial (and not so trivial) tasks,…
I think you have a biased outlook, to be honest. For every handful of programmers I know, I know at least 100 others who maybe can barely use their computer besides basic apps.
Programming is still not intuitive (nor enjoyable) for the vast majority of people, and I believe it will stay that way.
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
#43Frustratingly thin on details about the actual bakery (perhaps not surprising since it's a blog series). All I could figure out is this Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/theloafery/ . It seems he mainly sells at a market.
Maybe try asking him on twitter? https://twitter.com/pdcawley
I've been following him for some time (met him IRL at a conference in Kiev, Ukraine), and he's generally friendly.
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
#44This makes me wonder what someone with less computer experience would do, ie if you're not a former computer professional. Sure, open source makes everything rather accessible from a monetary point of view, but you still have to learn things. I almost feel like in the past there were more attempts at making this accessible to the end user, HyperCard, dbase etc, even just BASIC on your 8-bit machine. Nowadays? Excel/G…
Can't remember where I read the story, Steve Yegge perhaps. But they were talking about how where they worked secretaries actually used Emacs apps developed by the IT department and, over time, the secretaries started to extend the apps with Elisp.
Tech people have a problem with assuming that everyone is an idiot, mostly because it’s easier to do half-assed work aimed at a moron.
Legacy text based solutions that survived are usually much better designed by people who actually spoke to the users.
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
#45As people flock to become programmers, as a population we will become increasingly technologically literate. Sooner or later we will enter an age where programming is as second nature as writing. Communication at the end of the day is a way to get people to understand what we want. Programming is very similar only directed at machines, and as machines continue to replace people in trivial (and not so trivial) tasks,…
Yeah but (in "modern first world countries") how many people can and do solder a wire or turn a wrench or effectively give directions?
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
#46As people flock to become programmers, as a population we will become increasingly technologically literate. Sooner or later we will enter an age where programming is as second nature as writing. Communication at the end of the day is a way to get people to understand what we want. Programming is very similar only directed at machines, and as machines continue to replace people in trivial (and not so trivial) tasks,…
We thought this 20 years ago sure, but I think we have enough evidence at this point that people are going to drool on their iPad playing Candy Crush instead of hacking emacs.
I believe Marvin Minskey was quoted in "The Dream Machine":
> Computers may be a bicycle for the mind, but most peoples mental output is zero. 0 * x is still zero!
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
#47I haven't read the article (yes, I know, sorry), but the headline reminded me of a donut shop here in Houston.
I don't know if the sign is intentionally this way, or if the middle letter of the first word in the name fell off, leaving behind the short, horizontal mount point, but either way it amuses emacs folks a lot, because it appears to say:
M-x Donuts
Who among us hasn't wanted, at least once, to invoke that mode?
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
#48As people flock to become programmers, as a population we will become increasingly technologically literate. Sooner or later we will enter an age where programming is as second nature as writing. Communication at the end of the day is a way to get people to understand what we want. Programming is very similar only directed at machines, and as machines continue to replace people in trivial (and not so trivial) tasks,…
I've read the assertion that the spreadsheet is the first "programming environment" for the general population, and I like the idea. Input some numbers into 2 or more cells and the most basic function would be that the output is the sum of these numbers, displayed in another cell.
https://nodered.org/ offers a drag and drop environment, although indeed the general public would not understand the nodes ("TCP, mqtt, websocket?"), if they could make it more general it would be "easy" to make branches, which is what an if-else-statement is.
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
#49This is pretty cool to see. I frequently about how much most businesses could do if they just has a database to back there core business operations.
That's pretty much part of my job :-)
I work at a German IT outsourcing company that builds and runs its own datacenters (but also provides SaaS, ISP services, domains, the whole shenanigans).
We have a central database that was started basically at the same time as the company itself, and now covers asset management, semi-automatic billing, network management (and much more) but is also used to generate configuration for mail servers, web servers, DNS servers, radius, DHCP, etc.
Recently, topics such as revenue forecasts and being useful in compliance audits have become more important.
I like to think that this central database has played a part in the steady growth and success of the company, but it's hard to say without doing controlled experiments (to which leadership would most likely object :D).
Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL
#50I have only ever been a tech hobbyist, but I have leveraged my Python skills in a similar way. I run a home cleaning service with my wife, and I started using Airtable to track clients, jobs, expenditures, employee hours, etc. The data entry became tedious due to having to make entries in multiple tables for each job, so I wrote a Python script to use a simple command line read-eval-print loop to collect job informat…
What about Tkinter? https://wiki.python.org/moin/TkInter
Very simple and maybe a bit limited, but quite easily extended with some libraries.