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Why can't I write code inside my browser?

tomcritchlow.com

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Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#571

Post by DangitBobby »

oefrha wrote: post #74
DangitBobby wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's with the vitriol? The person who wrote this is active in the current thread.

The vitriol, if any, comes from eventually having to use products created by programmers without a shred of curiosity, expect everything handed to them, and do the bare minimum to create a semblance of working products. How many times have you used a website/app and it works so bad that you want to hit the programmer who wrote it? Frankly, “why do I need to figure out what PATH means” is shockingly non-curious even a…

This is not an excuse for being a dick.

Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#572

Post by kllrnohj »

brundolf wrote: post #570
kllrnohj wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter-argument here is that what the author wants already widely exists. There's a ton of one-stop "install this app & start coding!" apps out there. Someone wants one of those for node.js, sure, knock yourself out, go for it. It'd be just one of a dozen such apps, not a new concept, and not unexplored territory. But the authors request that this is built into the browser seems insane to me. Why would we bloat brow…

A big part of why BASIC took off with "non-programmers" (for a while) is that it was bundled on every DOS/Windows install. The same is true of Excel: people already have it and are using it, so they just organically start learning the more advanced things you can do with it, and before long they're basically programming. We aren't talking about people who make a concerted decision to "go find and install a tool for p…

> I think you underestimate the significance of the small barriers, even ones as small as a search-and-install step.

I think you over-estimate that barrier. It hasn't stopped things like TikTok, Instagram, etc... The modern world is installing apps. It's not a meaningful barrier.

What you're describing with organic evolution into programming is a cool property of things like Excel, yes. But you don't get that by just bundling an IDE into a browser, either. You still have that barrier of the user needs to decide they want to program. Which they don't want to do when they're just browsing reddit or whatever, that's not a natural evolution path like the Excel one.

Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#573

Post by minkzilla »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #479
grumple wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Programming can and should be much, much more user friendly than it is now. For what sort of users? It's clear a number of people here consider the command line difficult. I do not. There are many tools that make simple tasks very simple. I use it for manipulating tab files. I can pipe data through scripts and back through command line utilities, pipe it directly into a database, or do the reverse. It's very simple…

> For what sort of users? It's clear a number of people here consider the command line difficult. I do not. There are many tools that make simple tasks very simple. I use it for manipulating tab files. I can pipe data through scripts and back through command line utilities, pipe it directly into a database, or do the reverse. It's very simple, and very powerful. Consider all the things you've committed to memory that…

But in the long run knowing all that makes it easier. We could have some GUI for doing all those things but it would end up being a massive mess of buttons EVERYWHERE and endless menus. And maybe a nice wizard could be designed for the given example that you could check the boxes as you go and it would be easy to figure out the first time. But after 5 years of doing this same thing do you want to spend 2 minutes clicking through a wizard every time or do you want to have spent a little time learning some cryptic commands a couple years back and now you can type it out in 20 seconds. Or better yet you made a script and it takes 1 second to run ./processAndInsertToDevDb

I think the point is that most programming tools aren’t made to be easy to use the first time. They’re made so that the 100th or 1000th time it’s fast even if every time it’s been a little different.

Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#574

Post by minkzilla »

aspaceman wrote: post #262
TeMPOraL wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. That's because programming isn't just learning the vernacular. It's, first and foremost, learning to express concepts in a structured, super-precise way; learning to evolve systems in your head step by step, according to a set of arbitrary rules; learning the nature of computation. Familiarity with this type of thinking is visible not just in computer-related endeavors, but often in everyday life matters as well…

We gotta keep beating this drum though. You get people saying programming is just learning Node.Js or learning X or learning Y, and you end up with bootcamps and no computer science. Just reading this thread has been a true journey.

Reading this thread was extremely frustrating for me as I have this idea in my head that everyone on HN is a seasoned software engineer. But obviously that’s not true, which is a good thing! And I certainly shouldn’t be frustrated at other people’s perspectives, it’s making me think about complexity a little more.

I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding of complexity by newcomers of programming. A lot of people are pointing to the current state of the Unix command line as an example of being overly complex and bad. And certainly you could point to this or that command line tool and say that could be better designed and you’d probably be right. But all the command line tools we are familiar with weren’t designed in one go, they grew over time to fill needs. It could not have been done in one go, the different needs of different users and the overlap and disconnect is too great to know all beforehand. And the same thing would happen if we started from scratch today. We would design something we think is great and multipurpose only to realize it doesn’t quite fit this new requirement so we will have to add an edge case. Maybe we could do better than the current standard, but it won’t be perfect, there will always be corner cases and competing requirements.

Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#575

Post by marcosdumay »

lawl wrote: post #236
edu wrote: post #221

The author is not talking about "professional programming" but about a field called "end-user programming" or more generally "end-user development", which is a whole academic field with the goal os allowing end-users to develop their own solutions. From this field came things like Scratch [1]. If you're interested a very important paper in that area (from the philosophical aspect) is "Meta-Design: A manifesto for End…

> The author is not talking about "professional programming" but about a field called "end-user programming" or more generally "end-user development" I do think VisualBasic(6) had a thing there. It was so easy to visually design a GUI and slap some code into it. That said, as a "professional programmer" I once had to maintain such a VB6 application that was developed by someone that wasn't a professional programmer a…

> So my take on this is that it probably died for a reason.

Yes, Microsoft killed it.

Up to the point when Microsoft killed it, it did nothing but grow. And for years after Microsoft killed it, it did nothing but grow.

Microsoft killed it because it was a mess on every level, and they didn't like the part they were the ones maintaining. But lack of demand certainly wasn't a factor there in any way.

Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#576

Post by brundolf »

kllrnohj wrote: post #572
brundolf wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big part of why BASIC took off with "non-programmers" (for a while) is that it was bundled on every DOS/Windows install. The same is true of Excel: people already have it and are using it, so they just organically start learning the more advanced things you can do with it, and before long they're basically programming. We aren't talking about people who make a concerted decision to "go find and install a tool for p…

> I think you underestimate the significance of the small barriers, even ones as small as a search-and-install step. I think you over-estimate that barrier. It hasn't stopped things like TikTok, Instagram, etc... The modern world is installing apps. It's not a meaningful barrier. What you're describing with organic evolution into programming is a cool property of things like Excel, yes. But you don't get that by just…

I've personally used the browser dev tools in a "consumer" capacity, to:

- Filter content feeds by custom criteria

- Count the number of items in a list

- Tweak a blog post's styling to make it more readable

- Automatically click a large number of items at once (instead of manually)

- Delete cookie overlays and adblocker-detection overlays

Just a few weeks ago a friend asked me how he could go about putting together a little GUI for navigating some D&D rules

Not that the average person would necessarily bother to do all of this stuff, but I think there's a larger space of usecases here than you're assuming

Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#577

Post by moistbar »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #545
kaoD wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was there in the past and the tools are really not comparable. I just inserted a floppy disk and did A: then TP.EXE (which was just as arcane as knowing $PATH) but do I really want to work on Turbo Pascal in MS-DOS? Of course complexity skyrocketed! That's not a counterexample because beginners have contemporary expectations. There are simpler alternatives that just work. Why do beginners want to use Node.js locall…

> I was there in the past and the tools are really not comparable. I just inserted a floppy disk and did D: then TP.EXE but do I really want to work on Turbo Pascal in MS-DOS? Of course complexity skyrocketed! Did it do so for reasons that are still relevant today, is the question. > That's not a counterexample because beginners have contemporary expectations. Alright I'll present a counterexample: Lazarus. You downl…

>And arguments that understanding $PATH is somehow a necessary pre-requisite to get into programming sound like needless complexity fetishism to me.

Understanding your programming environment is absolutely a prerequisite to getting into programming. If you don't want to deal with $PATH, you should know enough about your target OS to know how to run things without it (which is really, really not hard to do).

No program exists in a vacuum.

Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#578

Post by lhorie »

It sounds like the author comes from a Windows background. FWIW, way back when I was a beginner, there were already tools geared towards this exact "no command lines ever" audience: xampp[0]. You'd be surprised how far xampp plus php.net docs can take you!

Nowadays, there's also tools like codepen, cloud9, etc, not to mention an endless amount of resources for learning in all sorts of formats (many of which are free).

The thing that bothers me is this idea of "look, I'm a beginner, but your not-geared-at-beginners tool should be geared at beginners!" Imagine you are a beginner at art, and you go around demanding that oil on canvas shouldn't involve brushes and mixing paints because that's too hard, or that metal sculpting shouldn't involve sparks flying out because that's too scary, and instead everything should be as easy as using crayons. That'd just be silly.

At some point in the mastery ladder, you will run into established tools and you just have to learn how to use them.

There's certainly an argument to be made about how rough the ground is when you've veered off the beaten path, but if we were to make a road analogy, while something like setting up a M1 assembler under linux might be way out in the weeds, installing node.js is at worst akin to driving in from out of town.

[0] https://www.apachefriends.org/index.html

Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#579

Post by minkzilla »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #548
ryandrake wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of this thread is people’s biases from what they are used to. I’m one of those guys who started on the command line and lived on the command line most of his life. I couldn’t imagine a more productive environment! I consider a bunch of xterms running vi to be the pinnacle of IDEs. But I did two brief stints at Windows shops and just couldn’t get really productive. The guy next to me who was scared of th…

I think it is perfectly reasonable to question whether all of that is necessary just to program stuff for the web.

“Just” to program stuff for the web? Web development is a complicated and amazing feat of engineering! The fact that you can write some code on your machine to make any pretty graphic and maze of pages you want and it will run in this thing we call a browser that pretty much anyone in the world can also run even if they are on Linux, windows, android, iOS, or any other number operating systems not to mention hardware! Think of all the layers of abstraction and code that is necessary to have millions of combinations of hardware + software all show the same thing! It’s amazing how simple it is to do web development! The fact that it is doable to set up a website in an afternoon that is accessible all over the world is ASTONISHING.

Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#580

Post by tartaglia »

moistbar wrote: post #567

I think the most infuriating thing to me about this article is that the author doesn't understand the existing tools well enough to have any idea why we need new ones, and instead decided to complain on his blog about how programming is too hard. ANYTHING is hard when you first start out. Try making a table out of wood, or doing origami, or playing an instrument for the first time, and unless you're some bizarre sava…

Wood working is too hard. I don’t care about the properties of this type of wood against that other type of wood. I just want to build a table. Let’s add a wood-working suite in the web browser so I can plan, execute, and build my table from there.
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