"My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing." • Hacker News Board

Re: "My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing."

#61

Post by RyanMcGreal » Wed, Jun 08, 2011, 2:39 PM UTC

> Japan is somewhat famous for churning out students who know a lot about English, but can't order a drink at Mac Donald's.

An old friend of mine had a master's degree in French literature. She used to live in Ottawa, Ontario and was fond of a pizza place just across the river in Hull, Quebec. One day she called to order a pizza, and when it came time to ask for it to be delivered she realized she didn't know how. She asked if the pizza place could put the pizza into a car and drive to her house with it.

The order taker replied, "Oui, delivery. Nous pouvons le faire."

Re: "My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing."

#62

Post by windsurfer » Wed, Jun 08, 2011, 2:39 PM UTC

david927 wrote: post #40

windsurfer wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is mathematical notation different from a written language like English? It conveys meaning using glyphs, uses nouns and verbs (and even adjectives). It expresses all sorts of ideas. One might even say that math's notation is a poor effort towards English.

Language can be expressive in ambiguous ways, with multiple valid ways to express the same emotion. Notation should be definable, unambiguous, and precise. The fewer ways to express something, the better.

Why?:

    die unless $file;

    if (!$file){
      die;
    }

Which is neater? Should I not be able to write the first one?

Re: "My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing."

#63

Post by losethos » Wed, Jun 08, 2011, 2:43 PM UTC

The truth is, all of you call all code written by someone else bad because understanding code is mentally painful. Stick with the code for a while and you'll start liking it more. Any code you don't understand is "bad".

Every single programmer, even with only 1 year experience is heavily opinionated and reckons himself a guru. Everybody God damn programmer thinks he's a guru!

Once you're not a newbie programmer, you'll stop complaining about all the minor formatting issues and stuff. A seasoned programmer follows, "When in Rome, do as the Romans."

Re: "My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing."

#64

Post by hxa7241 » Wed, Jun 08, 2011, 2:43 PM UTC

Saying programming is writing is like saying building something is 'speaking to materials'.

When you look at software, what you see is not a language, it is a machine. A machine that is presented in humanly understandable and communicable form, but nonetheless, something with a particular kind of underlying determinate structure.

Yes, the main part of the conclusion is the same: you have to learn by doing. But because software is design -- rational manipulation of objective 'material' -- knowledge about how it works is also an intrinsic part of doing it well.

Design means creating something through clear knowledge: we go with particular design ideas because we can predict their outcome and effect. This is the knowledge about that the article underestimates. We choose quicksort not simply because we have immersed ourselves in social norms, but significantly because it has been proven asymptotically fastest.

That kind of determinate knowledge that programming by nature can have is important. It is missing something to lump it in as just being like spoken language learning.

Re: "My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing."

#65

Post by msg » Wed, Jun 08, 2011, 2:44 PM UTC

vbtemp wrote: post #10

Oh come on. Programming is not writing. When you're reading a novel you don't have to worry about concurrent access to a resource, threads, asynchronous events, or even much less conditional branching. With all due respect, I think this is just an inane post. That said, I can't blame the guy for dropping software development and moving to Japan to teach ESL. I often entertain similar fantasies all the time - programm…

Never read Chronicle of a Death Foretold?

In programming, do you have to worry about phonology, slang, or number agreement?

The guy's deeper point is that programming is a language acquisition task and we would do well to take the rich set of lessons from ESL and foreign language learning and apply them to CS learning. Will all of it stick? No. But there is fertile green field to plow here.

Re: "My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing."

#66

Post by kenjackson » Wed, Jun 08, 2011, 2:47 PM UTC

tjogin wrote: post #18

vbtemp wrote: post #10

Oh come on. Programming is not writing. When you're reading a novel you don't have to worry about concurrent access to a resource, threads, asynchronous events, or even much less conditional branching. With all due respect, I think this is just an inane post. That said, I can't blame the guy for dropping software development and moving to Japan to teach ESL. I often entertain similar fantasies all the time - programm…

And in programming you don't have to worry about capturing the audience, the development of the characters, the story arch, being clear but not being obvious, etc. Both in programming and writing, the actual writing part is the easiest part. And while bad programmers can make a program work, and bad writers can tell a story, it takes good ones to do it coherently, efficiently and enjoyably. It's not the exact same th…

They're not nearly the same thing. The scope of modern literature has hardly moved in hundreds of years. Compare Updike, Roth, or Mitchell to Dante or Shakespeare -- they'd seem like near contemporaries in programming.

In contrast, in the past, programs to do Newtons method or compute trig tables were often the full scope of a program. You certainly never had a Halo 3, Windows 7, Google Search, or WordLens application written even 50 years ago.

Good literature isn't about automating increasingly sophisticated processes. Programming is all about that. This leads to increasing complexity of programs, where the goal of software engineering is to abstract/hide as much of the complexity as possible.

The only things they really share in common is that they're both written in text. If programs were written by soldering wires no one would make such odd acquisitions (do EE relate circuit design to writing literature?).

I think we give this slashdot author far too much credit.

Re: "My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing."

#67

Post by vorg » Wed, Jun 08, 2011, 2:50 PM UTC

david927 wrote: post #40

windsurfer wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is mathematical notation different from a written language like English? It conveys meaning using glyphs, uses nouns and verbs (and even adjectives). It expresses all sorts of ideas. One might even say that math's notation is a poor effort towards English.

Language can be expressive in ambiguous ways, with multiple valid ways to express the same emotion. Notation should be definable, unambiguous, and precise. The fewer ways to express something, the better.

> The fewer ways to express something, the better.

Your last sentence could be rewritten "It is better to express things in as few ways as possible", or "Having fewer ways to express something is better". English, however, allows you to omit the main verb for the causation in a parallel construction, you were able to write it shorter, and with a 3-syllable climax after a pause at the end for effect.

Shouldn't programming languages also provide many different ways to express things?

Re: "My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing."

#68

Post by SMrF » Wed, Jun 08, 2011, 2:50 PM UTC

edw519 wrote: post #16

Most code sucks because we have the fluency equivalent of 3 year olds trying to write a novel. Let's get a little more specific... Most code sucks because the programmer: - didn't name his variables what the really were - didn't understand variable state - didn't understand variable scope - didn't understand the basic concepts of iteration - didn't understand any of the algorithms he needed - wrote the same lines of…

I think you can check off everything on this list and still write inscrutable code. The worst code I've seen is code that was written so that only one person understands what's happening -- the author. Typically the code has too many branches and ridiculous call stacks. The writing analog is a run-on sentence.

This usually happens when the programmer at fault is really smart but still hasn't learned that at some point in the future, someone needs to come along and understand the code he/she wrote.

Maybe we need editors?

Re: "My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing."

#69

Post by stevenj » Wed, Jun 08, 2011, 2:53 PM UTC

I think good writing is conversational in nature.

I don't think writing code works that way.

Re: "My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing."

#70

Post by RodgerTheGreat » Wed, Jun 08, 2011, 2:53 PM UTC

regularfry wrote: post #37

DasIch wrote: post #29

I find it fascinating that Python seems to be the only language which created a word to describe idiomatic code: pythonic. Having learned Python as a first programming language I always try to gain an idiomatic understanding of the language which allows myself to think in Python.

Rubyish, perlesque, lispy are all words I've come across.

I've also heard 'Forthy'.