Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation • Hacker News Board

Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

#91

Post by analog31 » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 5:21 AM UTC

orev wrote: post #64

One of the main differences I see on the road to learning to code has nothing to do with the tools; it’s the thought process. A major hurdle is trying to get the business people to coherently express what they want. They seem to have a general sense of how something should go, but can’t actually put it down on paper. Or when they do, it looks different than what they imagined (simply because the required logic doesn’…

My mom taught programming in the 80s, and the first thing she told students was: "Computers are stupid. They only do exactly what you tell them to do." People have to get over the misconception that computers can think.

Maybe it was easier in the days of DOS, because merely using a computer required the same precision.

Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

#92

Post by analog31 » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 5:28 AM UTC

gryn wrote: post #77

burlesona wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that having a knack for math necessarily matters for making a good programmer. I’ve known many good engineers who were drawn to programming because math was hard for them and they wanted to learn how to get the computer to do it for them. Ironically, coming to understand programming can be a way to understand math better. One of the best programmers I know is a philosophy major, who thinks of code like…

math is not just about calculations and numbers that most people interact with during their education and seems to dislike or find hard. the part that would be useful in programming is a little bit of logical reasoning, the symbolic reasoning and modeling of problems through abstraction. coincidentally these are also the part of math that get thought and used in philosophy so I'm guessing that your colleague is somew…

I was exposed to this aspect of math through proofs, which are sadly given short shrift in K-12 math today. The schools in my hometown used a math curriculum that actually introduced basic set theory in first grade, and eased us into proofs. High school geometry was all about proofs. First of all, it was a good education. Second, proofs were what made math come alive for me.

I have a lot of opinions about K-12 math education. ;-)

Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

#93

Post by earleybird » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 5:28 AM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #78

earleybird wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:-) 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 Ju…

A while loop is only "recursion with tail-call optimization". It's not equivalent to "recursion without TCO". But "while (true)" is also equivalent to a goto :-) While both of those are true, I'm not sure that understanding either of them is relevant to dmitrigr's claim that you have to understand both recursion and pointers in order to amount to anything as a programmer.

You are of course correct and with respect to the claim "you can't be a good programmer without understanding indirection and recursion" I don't believe that holds water. I think different techniques allow for a deeper understanding; whether or not that deeper understanding translates to a "better programmer" is fairly subjective. For me, a good programmer is one who writes readable/understandable code and that's a different category all together.

Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

#94

Post by WatchDog » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 5:29 AM UTC

booleandilemma wrote: post #52

A 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…

I don't think you are necessarily wrong, but I'm not sure what this adds to the discussion.

There are plenty of competent people in non-programming domains. If "no-code" solutions can help these people build tools useful to them, that seems like a great thing to me.

Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

#95

Post by nnadams » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 5:53 AM UTC

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #90

booleandilemma wrote: post #52

A 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…

Does anyone not have trouble navigating Jira? I play Europa Universalis 4[0], and I feel like Jira is more complicated. 0: https://external-preview.redd.it/at0EwQpHU6A3xyU0KW80bc3aVMZ...

The interfaces of Paradox games only get better with each release in my opinion.

Crusader Kings 3 looks polished and is easy to use. Leagues above CK2. I love the stackable tooltips that let you define terms in tooltips defining terms in menus.

Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

#96

Post by Ericson2314 » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 5:55 AM UTC

analog31 wrote: post #91

orev wrote: post #64

One of the main differences I see on the road to learning to code has nothing to do with the tools; it’s the thought process. A major hurdle is trying to get the business people to coherently express what they want. They seem to have a general sense of how something should go, but can’t actually put it down on paper. Or when they do, it looks different than what they imagined (simply because the required logic doesn’…

My mom taught programming in the 80s, and the first thing she told students was: "Computers are stupid. They only do exactly what you tell them to do." People have to get over the misconception that computers can think. Maybe it was easier in the days of DOS, because merely using a computer required the same precision.

So much of the ML hype is business people wanting something that everyone can operate equally poorly.

The fact that so much of ML is inscrutable alchemy and a guessing game is a feature not bug.

Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

#97

Post by Mandatum » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 6:01 AM UTC

I really wish we put guard rails in the form of fines and damages to prevent people from exposing private or sensitive data. Handing people who have no idea about security or sensitivity of data the keys to the kingdom is like handing a toddler a loaded gun. Or a JavaScript, front-end UX developer the AWS root keys.

Oh wait, we've already done that - and we regularly see them blow their parent company's heads off.

Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

#98

Post by monocasa » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 6:04 AM UTC

solarmist wrote: post #44

zozbot234 wrote: post #38

Earlier 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.

I mean, we're renaming genes because of how much excel has been corrupting data.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam...

I agree that there's tons of value in the paradigm (more than a lot of people on hn would admit), but excel particularly has way more sharp edges than people know.

Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

#99

Post by noduerme » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 6:50 AM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #74

Business/career implications aside, normalizing people thinking about computers as tools that execute arbitrary instructions is an almost purely good thing. I can't think of many other social trends that would be more beneficial for increasing general support for user agency, data interoperability, sideloading/modding, etc... we should applaud every single attempt to democratize coding and lower barriers of entry. It…

It almost seemed like that global working knowledge of computers as tools would be the new norm, up until the early 2000s. In my own practice I saw more and more snall business owners writing their own websites and simple systems before coming to me to improve or polish up what they had. I always applauded that and I always try to make sure my clients have a full mental picture of what's really happening inside apps they commission from me now. Even if that means boring them with lots of details... they are savvier because they understand what can be done, and how. Sadly there's been a concerted effort by the FAANGs, mainly, to turn everything into an appliance and take that power away from users. You're absolutely right that anything that puts more power within the average user's reach is good for free computing and for free software development as a whole.

Re: Citizen developers are rapidly becoming the vanguard of corporate digitisation

#100

Post by _the_inflator » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 7:03 AM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #74

Business/career implications aside, normalizing people thinking about computers as tools that execute arbitrary instructions is an almost purely good thing. I can't think of many other social trends that would be more beneficial for increasing general support for user agency, data interoperability, sideloading/modding, etc... we should applaud every single attempt to democratize coding and lower barriers of entry. It…

> Business/career implications aside, normalizing people thinking about computers as tools that execute arbitrary instructions is an almost purely good thing. [...] > We don't need everyone in the world to be an engineer, and we don't need everyone to write good code.

I agree. In sum this means app-ification of the - from the business people - boring matter of REST APIs. In the end, you build or use a product that abstracts many things away. (There is an old joke, that Excel sheets simply become apps now)

In my experience in Financial Industry, this leads to second level problems: What and how to build a new product? So there is an important intersection between the new users, Citizen Developers, and Product Managers.