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Programming breakthroughs we need

yoyo-code.com

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Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#121

Post by jaredcwhite »

samiskin wrote: post #114
jaredcwhite wrote: post #99

As a dyed-in-the-wool Rubyist, I consider Ruby the pinnacle of high-level, abstracted, expressive programming for the contexts I care about (small web applications largely written by solo devs). What's sad to me is that the modern follow-up to Ruby seemingly doesn't exist. Every hot "language du jour" which has come after Ruby has gone BACKWARDS. Lower-level, more systems programming oriented. Maybe even compiled. St…

This all makes sense given "for the contexts I care about (small web applications largely written by solo devs)". Unfortunately for you most software (and therefore what most developers work with) isn't for those contexts, but rather for larger projects written by multiple devs, where being lower level and compiled (runtime speed) and having static typing (more explicit and easily understood by other devs) become muc…

I love being in the minority with my preferences…have for most of my life.

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#122

Post by SKILNER »

Banana699 wrote: post #88
bsedlm wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes. I wish I could somehow get to work on a blend between: a decompiler, debugger, emulator, static analyzer, memory profiler, and so on. The idea being some kind of a runtime for assembly code which does not actually execute the program but allows one to understand it in different sematinc levels, or dunno.. this is a very raw idea. needs a lot of work (and a lot more knowldedge) to set down. too bad none of the pr…

I think dynamic analysis is incredibly powerful and criminally underused in IDEs and other dev tools. I have thought of an idea about 6 months ago that has been fermenting in my mind since then : what if (e.g.) a Python VM had a mode where it records all type info of all identifiers as it executed the code and persisted this info into a standard format, later when you open a .py file in an IDE, all type info of the o…

I developed a dynamic analysis/IDE tool for old IBM systems. I was told by VC's that IT management never spends significant money on programmer productivity. I think they're mostly right. Maybe because no one knows how to actually measure it.

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#123

Post by panstromek »

probablypower wrote: post #93

For me it is the separation of business logic and data from the programming implementation. Often the workflow in automating a work process is: - Worker has intuition on how things work - Specialist starts automating and running into exceptions, walls - Worker explains exceptions as they're discovered - Specialist adds spaghetti to the 'clean' business logic model they started with - This keeps going until the end re…

> the ability to modify/adapt the business logic is lost through automation

This is a really interesting observation, I haven't thought about it like that before.

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#124

Post by simplify »

jaredcwhite wrote: post #115
heurisko wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Static typing everywhere. I think the industry has generally recognised that static typing makes more reliable software. I started with PHP and have seen its type system evolve. Similarly Typescript. I since moved to other staticly typed languages. I wouldn't want to go back.

Depends on the context. When you're programming a transactional banking system? Heck yeah I want static types. When you're programming a form on a web page? It's way-ay-ay more effort for dubious gains, with new downsides added into the mix.

I would LOVE static typing when programming a form on a web page. However, it's the fault of HTML that this is bad, not static typing itself.

Although, in theory, one could write a parser to inject what form elements are available into the type system... :)

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#125

Post by rmetzler »

WJW wrote: post #35
coding123 wrote: post #17

If an AI can now draw a rembrandt, then it's not far off that an AI can read this: Regular users are allowed to edit their own books. Editors are allowed to edit any books with the same account id. The public can read about any book that is not in draft status. I need a domain model where users can write books with the following properties: userId, accountId, title, author, status. status is an enum supporting draft,…

Assuming you mean that to be a rough draft for the spec of a book management app, you wouldn't need an AI to parse that and generate code. A simple DSL is enough and indeed the "spec" you wrote could be implemented in about ten minutes with Rails, devise and pundit. (I imagine most other popular backend webdev languages have similar libraries available)

I wonder if the author of the blogpost ever tried Rails’ convention-over-configuration approach. It might be exactly what he means when he says he gets to write less boilerplate.

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#126

Post by WJW »

jaredcwhite wrote: post #99

As a dyed-in-the-wool Rubyist, I consider Ruby the pinnacle of high-level, abstracted, expressive programming for the contexts I care about (small web applications largely written by solo devs). What's sad to me is that the modern follow-up to Ruby seemingly doesn't exist. Every hot "language du jour" which has come after Ruby has gone BACKWARDS. Lower-level, more systems programming oriented. Maybe even compiled. St…

The main problem with more and more abstract forms of describing "what you want" instead of "what the computer should do" is that the program still needs to run on a computer, and those are inherently non-abstract. There is no duck typing on the CPU level and figuring out what exactly you passed as an argument takes up a lot of time.

Don't get me wrong, I love me some Ruby and it makes up the majority of my income. But it would be foolish to ignore that it is indeed 100x slower (or more sometimes!) than some of the modern compiled languages. Small to medium web applications are exactly the sweet spot for Ruby because network latency hides a lot of the language slowness. Nobody cares about 20 extra milliseconds for a request to a server 100 ms away, but a lot of people care about 20 milliseconds delay in frame rendering.

EDIT: The following:

> What I actually want is a new programming language/environment which makes Ruby look like programming pointer arithmetic in C by comparison. Something so advanced, so high level, that much of the time you're really just describing patterns and flows and data models and extensions, and then letting the computer determine the most efficient way to develop those code paths and execute them.

sounds exactly how I feel when programming in Haskell, although that particular language will probably not sit well with you if you absolutely want duck typing.

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#127

Post by ransom1538 »

jaredcwhite wrote: post #99

As a dyed-in-the-wool Rubyist, I consider Ruby the pinnacle of high-level, abstracted, expressive programming for the contexts I care about (small web applications largely written by solo devs). What's sad to me is that the modern follow-up to Ruby seemingly doesn't exist. Every hot "language du jour" which has come after Ruby has gone BACKWARDS. Lower-level, more systems programming oriented. Maybe even compiled. St…

Agreed. Worse for me was starting with VB6 as a kid. A nice IDE, amazing debugging, easy visual components. Entering the professional field using php seemed like a strange nightmare. It was like taking a time machine into the past.

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#128

Post by cholantesh »

jocro wrote: post #18
cholantesh wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that what low-code solutions claim to offer?

This is closer to no-code, but yeah. Main reason to make the distinction is that most systems that parade themselves as "low-code" today are IME indistinguishable to high-code development to your average joe. Even taking this example, the level of value totally depends on the degree of abstraction you can trust the computer to perform for you. There is a tremendous amount of nuance to human language and while we've c…

I would agree. In my current role, we have a dedicated, growing team that builds such applications which tells me all I need to know.

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#129

Post by SanderNL »

jaredcwhite wrote: post #99

As a dyed-in-the-wool Rubyist, I consider Ruby the pinnacle of high-level, abstracted, expressive programming for the contexts I care about (small web applications largely written by solo devs). What's sad to me is that the modern follow-up to Ruby seemingly doesn't exist. Every hot "language du jour" which has come after Ruby has gone BACKWARDS. Lower-level, more systems programming oriented. Maybe even compiled. St…

I get your and the article's drift, but saying it won't come to pass because of grumpy programmers is IMO a bit unfair. I believe it'll come to pass, but it'll take a while because there's not a huge need for it right now.

I believe the whole computing ecosystem is very shallow at the moment. There are lots of tools and lots of programming languages, but they are all shockingly similar. There is just too much monoculture going on. We used to have APL, Lisp, Prolog. Weird stuff. Weird OSes. We need more of that weird stuff again. But there has to be some economic incentive for that to happen and I'm not seeing it at the moment.

Stuff like Smalltalk or even something like Symbolics' machines would be a better fit for people needing a more high-level approach to computing. These tools see very little if any real funding/action and my hunch is that this will change in the future. Not now, but someday. When indeed perhaps the philosophers, artists and psychologists of this world need to do some programming. I'm not a big fan of these kinds of systems, because I am one of those grumpy bastards that don't agree with "123" == 123 but I do see how these paradigms can fit other types of people more readily.

To be honest, I don't think we've even scratched the surface of what is possible.

Edit: OK I can't resist. "012" == ? This is making me lose sleep. These things are NOT the same. There, I said it.

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#130

Post by OkayPhysicist »

jaredcwhite wrote: post #99

As a dyed-in-the-wool Rubyist, I consider Ruby the pinnacle of high-level, abstracted, expressive programming for the contexts I care about (small web applications largely written by solo devs). What's sad to me is that the modern follow-up to Ruby seemingly doesn't exist. Every hot "language du jour" which has come after Ruby has gone BACKWARDS. Lower-level, more systems programming oriented. Maybe even compiled. St…

I agree with you that "Re-write your Ruby project in Rust" is a terrible suggestion. Pretty much only "Re-write your C++ project in Rust" makes any sense.

But it's not all bad. Elixir is pretty widely considered to be the Ruby successor. Types are replaced almost everywhere by pattern matching, the widely accepted unexpected behavior response is to just not handle it, crash the "process" (green thread) and continue on with life, integers don't overflow, and the macro system is powerful enough to do just about anything you want.

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