Programming breakthroughs we need
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Programming breakthroughs we need
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Re: Programming breakthroughs we need
#2I feel like a lot of boilerplate is a choice, that often comes from frameworks being used.
I disagree with the text criticism as well. The reason we spend time thinking and reasoning about code, is not because its text format. Its because that's the job. We aren't scribes just copying books. The hard part of programming is figuring out what to do, not writing it out. Well i am sure better visualizations or something could offer minor improvements to comprehending code bases, i doubt it will change things significantly. We will always spend most of our time trying to figure out what we need to do not doing it.
Re: Programming breakthroughs we need
#3> Maybe you could write tests as queries that would test a whole set of possible programs, not only the current version of your program at the moment.
I think that the future of programming is more sophisticated static analysis. Programmers will write statements like, "every code path that writes to the Payments database must have called validate_user()." Then, the tooling will confirm that rule with every commit.
We kind of have this already (for example, Facebook's Infer tool [0]), but I think it will become much more important in the coming decade.
Re: Programming breakthroughs we need
#4What we need before all this is a better way of specifying program behavior, both at a high and a low level.
In mobile there are multiple tools that you can use to prototype UI behavior. They allow you to specify navigation, transitions, clickable areas, behaviors when clicked, swipe actions, etc. They're this way so that the UI behaviors can be seen before coded (to an extent - not every prototyping tool does everything).
For code, well, only formal specifications get to that level. I haven't actually seen one of those outside of software engineering books, but I presume they exist in more critical fields. Commercial software doesn't really use them because they're too much work.
Re: Programming breakthroughs we need
#5I would suggest to author to look at functional languages, like Haskell. These are based on principles of function composition and referential transparency.
The move from testing to static analysis is happening there, in the expressiveness of the type system, and its inferences. Functional languages are on the forefront of experimentation with new type systems.
Re: Programming breakthroughs we need
#6There’s a lot of complaining and not a lot of suggesting going on in this article so I don’t take it for very much.
I feel like the author got a job and realized that it almost exclusively involves writing glue code and tests and looking at text diffs, so how convenient to imagine a world where they didn’t have to do the boring parts of their job.
Re: Programming breakthroughs we need
#7> Maybe you could write tests as queries that would test a whole set of possible programs, not only the current version of your program at the moment. I think that the future of programming is more sophisticated static analysis. Programmers will write statements like, "every code path that writes to the Payments database must have called validate_user()." Then, the tooling will confirm that rule with every commit. We…
Watch this (skip to 1:17:28 to see a quick demo, the rest of the video is the explanation):
It’s exploiting logic programming to query for a program that satisfies some condition.
Re: Programming breakthroughs we need
#8Software reuse-in-the-small is a solved problem, but reuse-in-the-large seems unsolvable. That’s been the state of things for decades.
Testing is hard because the requirement for correctness is often absolute and inflexible. When software is allowed to be a little incorrect, then yeah testing gets much easier.
Re: Programming breakthroughs we need
#9Eh, unfortunately the one programming breakthrough the world actually needs is one that would drastically change, and perhaps harm, most of the people around here.
We need more "Excels." More and better tools that let "regular" people program.
Re: Programming breakthroughs we need
#10Eh, unfortunately the one programming breakthrough the world actually needs is one that would drastically change, and perhaps harm, most of the people around here. We need more "Excels." More and better tools that let "regular" people program.
Or more realistically the rapid application development tools need to be better so we're not bogged down dealing with latest fad or resume driven development