This feels like "how can mirrors be real if our eyes aren't real" but applied to programming languages. It literally reads like fever dream nonsense.
Programming breakthroughs we need
371–380 of 511 posts
Re: Programming breakthroughs we need
#372As 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…
Yeah I think you'll realise how bad dynamic typing is when you stop working on solo projects.
I never said I only work on solo projects.
Re: Programming breakthroughs we need
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty sure I speak for a majority of experienced devs when I say: we don't fear abstractions. We fear abstractions made by others, including our former selves, in the all to often occurring context of "business wants it done by yesterday and we have zero idea what the requirements actually are". All the while we're still figuring things out and having 30 minute discussions on the most miniscule things.
I think you're all being too charitable to OP: "Programming would be easy if it weren't for stuck-up snobby programmers gatekeeping it" is up there with "math would be easy if it didn't have all this notation stuff" or "music would be simple if they didn't insist on writing it on those staves with those circles".
IMHO math notation is ugly AF, and music notation was something I hated so much as a teen I almost abandoned my budding professional music career because of it. (Thankfully I found a great niche in early European folk music.) So basically you're right. ;-P
Re: Programming breakthroughs we need
#374I believe already some 2 decades ago Bill Gates said that the biggest failure in software is the lack of productivity gains in software development. Just to cherry pick a dramatized example. In the late 90s, one of my first programming experiences was in Delphi. It's a very visual way to program. You drag and drop a UI together from standardized elements. You could data bind things like input fields to a data source.…
> JavaScript has no standard library. >> Math.sin(1.57) 0.9999996829318346 This would be pretty surprising output if there were no standard library.
it's a bit exaggerated, but it's true that the standard built-ins for javascript is poor compared to something like java.
Re: Programming breakthroughs we need
#375> 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…
That's a tenable way to view a program until you hit a compiler bug.
Mostly, you don't hit a compiler bug. When you think you've hit a compiler bug, it's not a compiler bug.
There's an easy workaround: write a compiler. It will have bugs.
There are other non-trivial ways that a program isn't its source, but in fact, systems which treat the source code as the ground truth are an important foundation. Many Smalltalk users would paint themselves into a corner by modifying an image to the point where there was no way to restart it, because its important properties were no longer captured in source code.
Re: Programming breakthroughs we need
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
The interesting part is that no, function calls do not all use an entire stack frame, unless you compile your code for debugging. Compilers are smart enough to reencode the calling into just registry shifting, or even inline the entire thing.
Agreed, compilers do now. In 1978, they did not. (although maybe even then things like BLISS, on minis, did?) The machine I learned C with maxed out at 64K data. Needless to say, the compiler was not doing much beyond peephole optimization.
Well, the developer saying that some times had a real point in 1978. A lot of developers migrated, some didn't, often for very good reasons. The 99% of the developers being ok with C only happened after optimizing compilers was a thing.
Of course, none of that means that the entire endeavor was worthless before that. It just means that whatever improvement you create, it won't appease to a lot of developers, and it's ok. One can only get unanimity if the change has no drawbacks at all, under no context.
Re: Programming breakthroughs we need
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
Programs are ideas that need to be understood, modeled, and manipulated by humans. Text is the best available way to incept ideas into the minds of humans.
If that were true, text books wouldn't contain any diagrams. So I think it's fairly uncontroversial to say that there are cases when text is not the best way to incept ideas. So why should we be confined to just text when writing code? Should we not be free to choose the best tool for the job?
If GPs statement were true, textbooks would be called text books instead of diagram books.
Re: Programming breakthroughs we need
#378Good luck trying to create something more powerful and versatile than text to create programs. Text is a seemingly basic, simple and even crude format. Ancient, outdated even? My opinion is that our perception about the simplicity of text is related to Moravec's Paradox, and is an illusion. Reading and writing text is something we take for granted, but this is a skill we all have to painfully learn at a young age, an…
I think you would be very interested in the experiments and results shown here: https://dion.systems/blog_0001_hms2020.html
Dion Systems were working on changing the format of text to an AST format, that can be represented in different forms of text as needed, and the changes and implications it creates for developers.
I think I heard that these developers are now working for Epic on a new programming system replacing the node-based blueprint programming system (think Scratch) for UE5 (probably using an ast based programming system that can be viewed in different text/node forms).
Re: Programming breakthroughs we need
#379I'd like to see:
the concept of the network should become tightly integrated - I should not have to jump through hoops to send network requests and evaluate their responses
handling errors should be extremely standardised in such a way that the programming language defines how it is done and all programming languages do it the same way
a programming language like Rust - inherently safe to do sophisticated multithreaded low level coding, guaranteed ot be memory safe and guaranteed not to have race conditions, but without the complexity of Rust
a programming language dramatically better at team coding - the idea of microservices is a terrible way of solving this problem
an internet that is type safe from top to bottom and all the type safety is the same typing system or at least compatible -all data and applications should talk through a ubiquitous type safe way of communicating
a much more obvious way, perhaps visual, of connecting data/functions/interfaces together - the typing systems I describe above should make it possible to just click code together
Re: Programming breakthroughs we need
#380I believe already some 2 decades ago Bill Gates said that the biggest failure in software is the lack of productivity gains in software development. Just to cherry pick a dramatized example. In the late 90s, one of my first programming experiences was in Delphi. It's a very visual way to program. You drag and drop a UI together from standardized elements. You could data bind things like input fields to a data source.…
"It's a very visual way to program. You drag and drop a UI together from standardized elements. You could data bind things like input fields to a data source. You'd double click a button and it takes you to the already created "onclick" event where you do the actual coding. In a way, this is still similar to how you can "program" Microsoft Access today." Yes! I remember Delphi as my first language in school, too. And…
Yeah it really feels like we’ve moved backwards in some dimensions since the era of Flash.