Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The “No Code” Delusion

alexhudson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 334 posts

Re: The “No Code” Delusion

#191

Post by JonathanHedley »

sgslo wrote: post #157
UserIsUnused wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank god trends like Pulumi and the new AWS sdk is emerging. General purpose programing languages are getting more expressive by the day, why do we use data serialization languages instead for configs? it doesn't make any sense. Configuration is code not data.

> new AWS SDK Could you share some details on that? A quick Google search didn't reveal anything about major changes to the SDK.

I believe the OP is referring to the AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit) - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/latest/guide/home.html

Re: The “No Code” Delusion

#192

Post by pwinnski »

shadowgovt wrote: post #144
bpizzi wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is no way in the language's design to pass a string to a function that only accepts a number, for example, because the "blocks just don't fit together." Which is easily achieved by the first typed language that comes to hand, no?

Not without an IDE. It's still extremely possible (in all text-based languages I'm familiar with) to write the program with a typecheck error; the typechecker will gleefully catch it for you. At typecheck time. Often (depending on my toolchain) minutes after I've written the offending code and mounds of code depending on it. It's possible, with many languages, to write IDEs that will make this hard, but I've yet to f…

Are you suggesting that you can do visual development without anything more than a text editor?

Apples to apples would mean comparing your Scratch experience with a nice IDE for a typed language.

Re: The “No Code” Delusion

#193

Post by rchaud »

chrisweekly wrote: post #135

Reminds me of being warned, over 20 years ago, that the viability of my new career as a web developer was in doubt thanks to tools like FrontPage and Dreamweaver.

Do you mean "developer" or "designer"? Dreamweaver wasn't a hobbyist's tool; it was priced like enterprise software, and had a ton of advanced functionality that really only web designers would have used.

It's quite a bit different from paying $10/mo for Squarespace.

Re: The “No Code” Delusion

#194

Post by hinkley »

chrisweekly wrote: post #135

Reminds me of being warned, over 20 years ago, that the viability of my new career as a web developer was in doubt thanks to tools like FrontPage and Dreamweaver.

My dad found himself with a useless MBA in the 80's recession, so retrained as a programmer after I'd already decided that's what I wanted to be when I grew up (not the last time he would steal an idea from me and run with it).

When I was in highschool the fervor over so-called 4th Generation Languages was kicking up and he worried the career might be going away. I wasn't that worried, and I can't recall entirely why I wasn't.

Today I'd say that they will always need mechanics for the robots, but in fact the situation is not even that dire. AI, which I still believe will fail all over again, replaces less than half the code we write - it deals with the decision whether to do something, but not how to accomplish it. And we already know that we're fucking up data management pretty badly. If 40% of my job went away at the wave of a wand (nothing is ever that simple, and it takes a painfully long time to migrate to new systems), we'd have more time to invest in the provenance of data and protecting it once we have it. I'd still be overbooked and our customers would be a little less salty.

Re: The “No Code” Delusion

#195

Post by reitzensteinm »

brazzy wrote: post #39
osullivj wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nearly 40 years for me; I remember reading about The Last One [1] back in 81. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software)

The pipe dream is far older than that. Around 1960 some people seriously claimed that within about 5 years there would be no more professional programmers because with this new language, everyone could write the software they need themselves, since it was so easy to use. The language was COBOL. Oh, and look, this one still seems to be around: http://www.makeyourownsoftware.com/

Oh my god, I was convinced until the end that it was a top notch joke site... then I got to the credit card form.

Re: The “No Code” Delusion

#196

Post by badsectoracula »

sgift wrote: post #152
chrisweekly wrote: post #135

Reminds me of being warned, over 20 years ago, that the viability of my new career as a web developer was in doubt thanks to tools like FrontPage and Dreamweaver.

Frontpage and Dreamweaver ... never before could you produce so much bad code in so little time. And never before did the person who had to clean it up to have any chance of breaking out of the box and change something hate you so much. Especially if said person was you six month later.

Well, but if all you cared about was the design and not the code, then those tools were very useful. Sometimes i use Adobe PageMill (which is essentially a rich text editor ala WordPad that saves in HTML and has a sidebar with a file browser) to create very simple sites (e.g. [0]). I do not really care about what the code looks like since i'm not going to edit it by hand anyway (though FWIW i find it very readable).

Many years ago i worked at a company where i had to edit PHP files edited in DreamWeaver by someone who had no idea about PHP, programming or even HTML (they'd design and write the text for the pages, i'd supply some code). The only issue i remember having was a couple of times making DreamWeaver unable to open the page, but that was fixed quickly.

Honestly personally i'm a big fan of WYSIWYG applications and i really see it as a big step backwards how many things nowadays rely on (often several) preprocessing steps of codes like Markdown, RST or adhoc syntaxes. I understand that it is much simpler and easier to implement this way and i do it myself too, but i do not pretend that this is somehow easier for the end user or it has better usability (and especially grinds my gears when someone tries to convince me otherwise by using edge cases that only happen at 0.1% of the time, if at all, when actually writing/editing the content is what you'd do 99.9% of the time).

[0] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/lila/

Re: The “No Code” Delusion

#197

Post by tabtab »

alxlaz wrote: post #30

I was pretty young back then but I do remember a lot of these things being driving forces behind 4GL and 5GL languages. I played with a lot of these things because I was just getting into programming and I was still at the "syntax is hard, maybe what I need is a simpler language" phase... A lot of these things failed for reasons that are, I think, fundamentally unavoidable if your goal is to not learn anything and ju…

Re: "A simpler and more stable development framework. Keeping up with JS and CSS frameworks (many of which exist precisely because pure JS and CSS are pretty painful to use if you want to develop a desktop-like application) is hard even for people who use them professionally. There's no way you can ask business people to keep up with that. A more stable framework, that hides the fact that browsers were never meant for application development well enough (even if that means less flexibility) could go a long way towards making things easier."

Indeed! We need a GUI/desktop-oriented markup standard for in-house and custom CRUD. It's a big market that shouldn't ignored at the expense of other markets (such as sales-oriented websites).

All the companies who want a chunk of Microsoft's business should get together and help define such a standard. Google, IBM, Oracle, Amazon, Apple, do you hear that? The MS pie is waiting to be sliced up for YOUR benefit. Get on it!

Re: The “No Code” Delusion

#198

Post by AmericanChopper »

I think we’ve already been moving closer and closer to “no code” simply through the evolution of programming languages and tools, much more than we have through the advancement of specific “no code” frameworks.

Programming languages are becoming higher and higher level. Abstracting more and more boilerplate and plumbing. Then you have frameworks specifically designed to fill that role, and package repositories, further reducing the amount of code you have to write.

The outcomes are that:

1) Your source code has a much higher ratio of business logic to everything else

2) Your business logic is expressed in less lines of code, and in ways that are increasingly becoming more similar to their natural language representation

We haven’t reached “no code”, but we are currently at “much less code”, and a lot of projects can be achieved with “very little code at all”.

Re: The “No Code” Delusion

#199

Post by zokier »

shadowgovt wrote: post #144
bpizzi wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is no way in the language's design to pass a string to a function that only accepts a number, for example, because the "blocks just don't fit together." Which is easily achieved by the first typed language that comes to hand, no?

Not without an IDE. It's still extremely possible (in all text-based languages I'm familiar with) to write the program with a typecheck error; the typechecker will gleefully catch it for you. At typecheck time. Often (depending on my toolchain) minutes after I've written the offending code and mounds of code depending on it. It's possible, with many languages, to write IDEs that will make this hard, but I've yet to f…

I'm strong believer, even if that belief doesn't come up often, in structured editing[1] which sort of bridges the gap and makes writing invalid programs impossible, at least syntatically but I don't think adding type level checking is a big jump and I haven't kept up with research so that might already be there. Unfortunately I don't know any successful examples of that beyond research projects that I could point out. I remember hearing rumors that some of the LISP machines might have veered to that direction, but idk

Even more I don't believe in plain monospaced ASCII being the ultimate format for code. Luckily there I know one example that goes at least a bit further: Fortress[2], a language from Sun that had richer rendering format available (although the underlying form was still afaik textual). And of course APL is another example, albeit bit less easily approachable. Raku also has some cute tricks (of course it does) with unicode characters[3], but they are more really just tricks that radical revolution in design.

There are also lots of other interesting ideas on how to format and layout code in the research, just one random example is "code bubbles"/"debugger canvas"[4]

While I think all this and so much more has great potential, there is huge cultural entrenchment around simple text based programming that seems unlikely to be overcome any time soon. As for graphical programming, I think the common failure there is being often also heavily mouse-driven, while keyboard is really powerful input device.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_editor also known as projectional editor

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20060819201513/http://research.s... has some examples, slide 33

[3] https://docs.raku.org/language/unicode_ascii for example "The atomic operators have U+269B ATOM SYMBOL incorporated into them. Their ASCII equivalents are ordinary subroutines, not operators". Obviously.

[4] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/debugge... paper has few screenshots

Re: The “No Code” Delusion

#200

Post by hinkley »

sgift wrote: post #152
chrisweekly wrote: post #135

Reminds me of being warned, over 20 years ago, that the viability of my new career as a web developer was in doubt thanks to tools like FrontPage and Dreamweaver.

Frontpage and Dreamweaver ... never before could you produce so much bad code in so little time. And never before did the person who had to clean it up to have any chance of breaking out of the box and change something hate you so much. Especially if said person was you six month later.

My first job involved an element of hand-validating third party HTML and really, those two tools germinated a seed of hatred for generated code that grew and flourished unabated until the first time I looked at the output from an SCSS file. If not for Less and Sass, I might have gone to my retirement never having liked a single code generator. Because they all wrote the most atrociously wrongheaded code from perfectly reasonable user inputs.

(By one definition, compilers generate machine code, but those did not fall under my umbrella definition of code generator)

Post reply on HN