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Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
51–60 of 203 posts
Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
#52A lot of non-programmer office workers I've met aren't capable of writing software. Full stop. They're simply too incompetent. It's an uncomfortable truth.
I'm talking about scrum masters who have trouble navigating Jira, business analysts who aren't able to have a written conversation, product owners who struggle to create Outlook calendar invites.
Imagine asking these same people to write software rather than just use it. It isn't just a matter of training, it's a matter of disposition, and the gap is wider than we as a society care to admit.
Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren’t they bad examples? There’s a distinction between an extremely rare occurrence of biological factors like being 7 feet tall in order to succeed, and that of needing a decent education in order to think critically.
Some people just cannot wrap their head around pointers. Some just do not get recursion no matter what. I used to teach CS, and tutor in CS. It is as rare as being 7 feet tall, sadly. And without understanding indirection and recursion, the most you'll ever do is ...well..not much...
Sit in a room and point at a spot on the floor.
You are a pointer, pointing at nothing.
Attempt to put shit where you're pointing and you have shite all over the floor.
Malloc creates a bucket. Now when you put shit where you're pointing it lands in a bucket.
When you're done with the bucket you clean it up.
If you try to put too much in the bucket, you end up with shite all over the floor.
If you forget to clean up the bucket, the place will start to stink.
If you change the pointer so nothing is pointing at the bucket of shit, then it will just sit there, forgotten. But the shit is still there.
No one ever forgets this way of teaching it.
Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Excel is a disaster. It will randomly corrupt input that happens to fit certain patterns by parsing it into "dates" or "numbers", unless you go to the trouble of explicitly setting the right "cell properties" via the incredibly clunky UI. It hides the code that's input in cells, lets it randomly mix with input data and does not support any kind of source control for it. It's not even fit for purpose as a prototyping…
Yup, but you can make it do the job and that's enough for the majority.
It's only "enough" to them because they don't grok the failure modes. Which is basically the story of almost all "no-code" or "low-code" tools.
You can do "low-code" and even "no-code" right, but it basically has to be a DSL that's cleanly defined in terms of some other programming language with sensible semantics. That way when the DSL fails to do what you expect it to (as it invariably will at some point), you at least get to pick up the pieces and carry on. But that's not how Excel is built, or most similar tools.
Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
#55The author miss the point that coding complexity is exponential, not linear. I.e. a lot of people can understand 10-20 lines of code, less can 100 LOC, less can 1000 LOC, maybe top 10% can understand 10K, 1% - 100K. So no code can work, just that the size limit of the program will be low (10-100 LOC) . However, most program start at low LOC, but ends up with high LOC, where the low code tools breaks. Hence, the low c…
There is a difference between understanding 10, 100, and maybe 1000+ but beyond that I'm not so sure. Who really understands a 100k code base they didn't write themselves except at a high level anyway? I think once a developer accrues an understanding of certain key abstractions, it's just a matter of exposure and practice working within code bases.
No-code is a separate issue. Visually organized programs become very hard to understand very quickly.
Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technically accurate, but not practically true. If you've ever needed to teach someone patience, you'd see the futility of trying to teach a random person programming. Nowadays, I will tell people straight out I can't see them dealing with the frustrations long enough to develop the patience needed to learn the basics.
I never teach people to code. I ask them what they want to build, and then we work to building that. People don't need to be patient. Beyond assignment, if, for and while, just make sure they use good variable names and function names. Code reviews take care of the rest.
If learning your first programming language doesn't require patience, I don't know what the word means.
I've never met anyone who wasn't frustrated for at least the first few months trying to get even basic programs working. The syntax is orders of magnitude less tolerance of mistakes than any other subject.
Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
#57Word meaning tangent: I have never heard the expression "line-of-business employee" before and I'm not quite sure what it means. Is it trying to differentiate from the "IT department" which is a cost centre?
Or are they just trying to say "ordinary employees" as in non-technical? Why don't they just use a generic term like "office workers" or something?
Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some people just cannot wrap their head around pointers. Some just do not get recursion no matter what. I used to teach CS, and tutor in CS. It is as rare as being 7 feet tall, sadly. And without understanding indirection and recursion, the most you'll ever do is ...well..not much...
I've done embedded systems for 35 years. I've done quite a bit. Never needed recursion. (Not much use for it in the embedded world...) Now pointers... yeah. I use those a fair amount.
:-) If you've written a while loop you've used recursion. Not saying you need to understand the inner beauty of a fixed point combinator . . . it's just there, to be noticed, if you choose. You might (meaning if it caught your eye) study some recursion and notice some properties that give you some insight into how your algorithm performs or how induction over your datatypes works. Often when writing some Scheme or Julia, I'll carry a mental model in C at the same time.
What I enjoy about code is that I can understand it on a number of levels.
Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup, but you can make it do the job and that's enough for the majority.
It's only "enough" to them because they don't grok the failure modes. Which is basically the story of almost all "no-code" or "low-code" tools. You can do "low-code" and even "no-code" right, but it basically has to be a DSL that's cleanly defined in terms of some other programming language with sensible semantics. That way when the DSL fails to do what you expect it to (as it invariably will at some point), you at l…
Preaching to the choir, but mostly they don't care about any of that.
Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation
#60They'd all start trying to find their way into project management or design or something. Being able to code is an important part of being a software developer but being able to code makes you no more of a software developer than learning newton's laws of motions makes you a mechanical engineer. There are edge cases, debugging, scalability, one off errors integration, backups, etc. We tried this with VB and Acces and…
> being able to code makes you no more of a software developer than learning newton's laws of motions makes you a mechanical engineer. Yes! I wish this point got more attention. So many articles - there was one on here from a16z today - pretend there is this magical thing called learning to code that takes a couple months and suddenly puts you on par with every software developer. The analogy I like to use is claimin…
This reminded me of "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years" - http://www.norvig.com/21-days.html