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

What was the last breakthrough in computer programming? (2019)

quora.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 226 posts

Re: What was the last breakthrough in computer programming? (2019)

#31

Post by gcanyon »

blacktriangle wrote: post #16
karmakaze wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that you have to think in a different style so would classify as a different paradigm and not just syntax.

Going back to the original comment, the statement was that any experienced engineer could learn a language in a day. At risk of gatekeeping, I'd argue that by definition any experienced engineer would have some experience with an array based language like APL or MATLAB so that no, J does not qualify as a different paradigm.

The implication of the original comment was that any C-style language engineer could learn any C-style language in a day. I'd even argue that point, but it definitely doesn't get you J in a day, except that an supports most C-style syntax.

So you can program in J like a C-programmer in a day. You definitely can't program like a J-programmer. And to say a competent engineer would already have array-language experience sidesteps the point.

Re: What was the last breakthrough in computer programming? (2019)

#32

Post by Jtsummers »

gcanyon wrote: post #7

I think Kay's complaint about engineering rigor ignores the explosive growth of programming. Sure, bridge-builders have rigor; there's also probably about the same number of them today as there were 50 years ago. The number of programmers has grown by at least two, maybe three orders of magnitude over the last half century. And more importantly, almost anyone can do it. A kid whose closest approach to structural engi…

> That level of access guarantees amateur-level code, and the rigor Kay is suggesting would kill the software industry as we know it.

I don't believe this follows. The level of rigor he's lamenting could be constrained to certain categories of software, based on their impact or information content. Amateur or informally specified systems can still satisfy everything else. There is no reason for most systems that don't touch PII or critical systems or other similar categories of software to have serious engineering behind them if people don't want them to.

Re: What was the last breakthrough in computer programming? (2019)

#33

Post by mlosgoodat »

platz wrote: post #28

So if Pizza Hut wants a checkout cart they need to rent a supercomputer to plan the implementation?

He was speaking as if it was still 1980s. Now we have cloud based ML doing the optimization finding.

ML will (eventually) be able to generate biz logic code, and most assuredly infrastructure config (a cloud API has a limited set of possible configs of value to our sorting patterns), UI code (we gravitate towards a limited set of UX it seems), to solve much of our daily programming work.

ML can’t invent future ideas, it can’t evolve itself without us making new hardware for it. But it will implode the blue collar dev job market eventually.

Re: What was the last breakthrough in computer programming? (2019)

#34

Post by IncRnd »

gcanyon wrote: post #31
blacktriangle wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going back to the original comment, the statement was that any experienced engineer could learn a language in a day. At risk of gatekeeping, I'd argue that by definition any experienced engineer would have some experience with an array based language like APL or MATLAB so that no, J does not qualify as a different paradigm.

The implication of the original comment was that any C-style language engineer could learn any C-style language in a day. I'd even argue that point, but it definitely doesn't get you J in a day, except that an supports most C-style syntax. So you can program in J like a C-programmer in a day. You definitely can't program like a J-programmer. And to say a competent engineer would already have array-language experience…

The original comment said nothing about C-style languages. That must be something you read into their comment.

Learning J is like learning Perl or regular expressions. Nobody really wants to engage in such an activity, but people do what they need to do. Depending on their level of experience, a person who understands imperative and declarative paradigms along with the language's execution model can absolutely learn J within a day, because it only differs in syntax from the existing languages.

Re: What was the last breakthrough in computer programming? (2019)

#35

Post by jimbokun »

I think the biggest programming productivity boosts since 1984 haven't been about programming languages, but about tools.

Specifically, distributed version control and dependency management tools.

Being able to collaborate with developers anywhere in the world, and being able to pull in any library with a single declarative line in a configuration file, increases productivity more than any improvement to a programming language ever could.

Re: What was the last breakthrough in computer programming? (2019)

#37

Post by pharmakom »

mikewarot wrote: post #19

Metamine represents the latest breakthrough in programming, it offers a mix of tradition declarative programming and reactive programming. The "magical equals" for lack of a better term, lets you do "reactive evaluation", the opposite of lazy evaluation. If any of the terms that a term depend on change, the result is updated, and all it's dependencies, etc. You can use the system clock as a term, thus have a chain of…

Can’t this be expressed as a library in Haskell or even F# though?

Re: What was the last breakthrough in computer programming? (2019)

#38

Post by ComodoHacker »

ragnese wrote: post #25
karmakaze wrote: post #15

There isn't so much in languages features themselves, but in their implementations. GC can be largely pauseless for many practical purposes and a GC language can be within 2x-3x the performance of C-like languages. Also the amount/cost of memory has improved so that we can use immutable datastructures and functional style in many contexts, which definitely feels like a 'level-up'. Concurrency has been getting easier…

It's nice to read a positive comment like yours occasionally, because the vast majority of the time, I'm just disappointed in how bad our programming tools (including languages) are. It's become a meme in my office that I'm the guy constantly bitching about how stupid our languages are. This week I was back on my soap box about the fact that almost zero mainstream (statically typed) programming languages can even let…

>how often have you ever written a function that requested a string as input and actually wanted an empty string?

To be fair, I do it quite often. Most of the strings I deal with in my code are coming from user input, and most of them are optional. They are usually just passed to/from a database. If the string has some internal meaning (like ULSs or file paths), it usually gets wrapped in an object anyway.

If you're processing some formal language or network protocol, that's another story.

Re: What was the last breakthrough in computer programming? (2019)

#39

Post by ComodoHacker »

jimbokun wrote: post #35

I think the biggest programming productivity boosts since 1984 haven't been about programming languages, but about tools. Specifically, distributed version control and dependency management tools. Being able to collaborate with developers anywhere in the world, and being able to pull in any library with a single declarative line in a configuration file, increases productivity more than any improvement to a programmin…

>Specifically, distributed version control and dependency management tools.

Indeed, without these tools dependency hell wouldn't be possible! /s

Post reply on HN