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

Programming breakthroughs we need

yoyo-code.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 511 posts

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#181

Post by rawgabbit »

I find it interesting, there are no comments about the author's argument that programming today is inefficient as the most popular "model" are relational databases. "* I imagine this model as a relational database...it becomes clear that using a textual source code is really inefficient way to manipulate this model.*" It wasn't too long ago, object oriented programming, ORMs, and NOSQL was in fashion. I believe that was a dead end.

I don't believe relational databases are the end all or be all either. What has stood the test of time is the double entry accounting transaction journal entry. In this model, the journal entry is the system of record. And you can have multiple distributed systems creating these entries at the same time. You collect and aggregate these entries to display the "balance" at a specific point in time. To me, this is what Kafka distributed logs powerful. Distributed logs builds on a proven concept.

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#182

Post by dleslie »

preseinger wrote: post #174

> Program is not a text, [it is] a model I don't think so. In fact, I think this perspective is actively harmful. A program is whatever the human beings who maintain that program operate against. I mean there are many possible representations of a program, and there are different ways to evaluate those models, but the model that most precisely expresses the AST of the logic of the program, or the call sequence of the…

Indeed, in a way the author is saying that the meaning is independent of the text; which, in literary circles, was once hotly debated. I land on the textual side of the line; the medium is as important to the meaning as the abstract concepts that might be components of it. Multiple tellings of the same story carry different meaning, sometimes subtly, when they are each one of oral, text, photo, painting, or film.

I believe the same is true of programming. A solution in C is fundamentally distinct from a solution in ladder logic, or Haskell; even if they solve the same problem.

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#183

Post by bramblerose »

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…

https://github.com/instagram/MonkeyType can perform the call logging, and can export a static typing file which is used by mypy, but also e.g. PyCharm. It doesn't expose such fine grained types, but you could build that based on the logged data.

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#184

Post by rictic »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #170
choeger wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's way-ay-ay more effort Just because you tend to ignore the many complexities that are actually involved in a form on a web page. It's exactly this bias that stems from untyped languages and that needs to die. Http is a complex beast and we should either replace it with something more simple and robust or at least acknowledge the complexity in our programming. Generally speaking, if doing something with a proof…

It's not complexity. It's pointless bookkeeping. If you don't cut corners on your static typing, you're looking at 2-4 single use classes per API endpoint: 1-2 for the web layer, and 1-2 when going into the domain logic layer. Many people skimp and just re-use the core domain class for everything, which is the worst of both worlds. I'll take a map, spec, and select-keys over this all day long.

That's if you write it in Java. With a type system like TypeScript's you can write largely the same code as before, with a few annotations to clarify what you mean, and you get the exact same runtime only you also will get compile errors if a change elsewhere in your program violates the assumptions of that code.

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#186

Post by cultofmetatron »

preseinger wrote: post #174

> Program is not a text, [it is] a model I don't think so. In fact, I think this perspective is actively harmful. A program is whatever the human beings who maintain that program operate against. I mean there are many possible representations of a program, and there are different ways to evaluate those models, but the model that most precisely expresses the AST of the logic of the program, or the call sequence of the…

to add to that, this programming is a model is how we got smalltalk. a collection of interesting ideas from which its peripheral ideas got pillaged into other languages while leaving the core idea to just smalltalk.

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#187

Post by callinyouin »

The whole "program is a model" part makes me think of Smalltalk's image-based system. I never really got used to programming this way myself, but I do think an image-based environment might check some of the author's boxes. With the right tooling, a Lisp might even be a decent choice.

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#188

Post by csours »

akersten wrote: post #134
csours wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. I would say the complete opposite. Why are you writing a program for work unless you are helping to solve a problem? The implementation only exists to work with business logic and data. Excel is an implementation that does not care about business logic and data. Anyone can add their own business logic and data.

That most of the business world lives and breathes Excel is a testament to OP's point. Companies can cram whatever garbage logic they like into a spreadsheet and no one has to call a developer Microsoft because their pivot table isn't doing The Business Thing that they expect - the end users simply have the power to understand and fix the problem themselves.

Sure, but then what is your job? Making Excel? No one needs you to make Excel, it already exists.

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#190

Post by mtVessel »

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…

This is only feasible if the program takes no input, or a very limited set. Once you open it up to arbitrary input, no single run (or even a large set of runs) can capture everything the program might be expected to handle.

How does the type profiler know that the variable that only contained values like "123" or "456" was handling identifiers, not numbers?

Post reply on HN