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Programming breakthroughs we need

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Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#411

Post by AtlasBarfed »

I think the biggest waste is lack of interoperability and usablity of libraries and code between languages.

There is SO MUCH CODE out there. To some degree that is a bad thing, but there are genuinely good libraries in other languages that would be nice to more seamlessly utilize in other languages.

Generally, there isn't a "best of breed" movement to actively track which implementations and approaches to things (json deserialization/serialization, http client, regular expressions, high speed I/O, algorithms and data structures.

Instead, good approaches organically move around, or are at the whim of the steward of a language recognizing and pushing for some new language, approach, etc. Often good approaches or libraries or interfaces are shut out from another ecosystem over nothing more than dogma or reactionary hated in the worst case.

Instead, if one language gets a good library, you either interface at the OS level or you have to migrate to that language if the library is that critical.

The JVM was close to this, with Jython, JRuby, Javascript, Groovy, Clojure, and lots of other languages runnable within JVM code. Ultimately, notably Ruby where the JVM was the fastest runtime for Ruby for a time, rejected that approach.

But I think it was the right approach fundamentally, if the politics got in the way. LLVM may have that potential, but it seems to tied to compilerland. OS-level interop seems generally a failure, either because of OS balkanization or other concerns.

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#412

Post by analog31 »

eek2121 wrote: post #408
fleddr wrote: post #342

I 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.…

Ironically, I know everything from ASM to...well many languages, including C, C++, PHP, Python, Ruby, Javascript, etc. The most productive tools I used prior to learning all of that? HyperCard on the Mac, Visual Basic on Windows. Why? Tooling. Even when you had to get down and dirty, it seemed the tooling helped you out in some way. Shoot, I wrote an application back in the 90s in VB6 that still is functional TODAY n…

I have personally never regretted using tools that were dismissed as "toys" by the mainstream devs. Including HC, VB, and Arduino. I've got a VB5 program running in the factory that has had virtually zero failures in use for 14 years. I even hand-translated a curve fitting routine from Numerical Recipes into VB.

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#413

Post by loh »

> Writing glue code and boilerplate is a waste

> Why not use a framework?

These 2 sections highlight exactly the problems I've been trying to solve with Molecule.dev. I agree with the author that software development has somewhat stagnated, and I believe something like Molecule.dev is the future. It isn't perfect and there's still a lot of work to be done, but I'm certain it's headed in the right direction. The codebase is currently in the process of being repackaged (it'll be an MIT licensed monorepo) so that developers can more easily play with it, and so that it can be more easily integrated into existing systems, as starter apps are not a frequent enough problem to build a scalable business from. This repackaging is taking longer than normal because all the investors I've spoken to apparently don't see the value in it (yet), so I've been looking for contract work to stay afloat. (Know anyone?)

> Testing and Correctness

> I want simpler testing

I built something else in early 2020 to address this exact problem as well, TestFront.io. I haven't touched it in a while (so don't sign up) but I may return to it eventually. It's open source. I've tried many testing tools/frameworks and none of them quite do what TestFront.io does. There is a pretty similar tool which someone turned into a very successful business (actually can't remember the name of it now), so there's definitely some value in it, but from what I saw when trying it, it's still not quite up to par with TestFront's granularity and ease-of-use. I'd like to return to TestFront some day, but for now there are bigger fish to fry.

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#414

Post by vineek »

Very nice article. Literate programming might have some interesting features in this direction. The not so obvious thing is how it can scale.

A very good example of literate programming can be found in the fantastic book Physically Based Rendering [1]. It also has a preface discussing it [2].

The authors write a full physically-based rendering system in a declarative fashion. This approach has also led to a nicely adapted web-based version of the book [3].

Although we have successful examples like TeX and HTML, it would be very interesting to see this approach explored further by a more modern language or programming methodology.

[1] https://pbrt.org/

[2] https://www.pbr-book.org/3ed-2018/Introduction/Literate_Prog...

[3] https://www.pbr-book.org/3ed-2018/contents

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#416

Post by andsoitis »

mikewarot wrote: post #409
throwaway2037 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the general sentiment of your post. Regarding Java and C#, I am stunned by how good are IDEs now. To be clear, when I say IDE, I am specifically talking about a tool that enhances the edit-compile-debug cycle. Compared to 20 years ago when I wrote C, C++, and Perl, the IDEs were mostly terrible, except Visual Studio for Windows. The majority of my development cycle was all terminal-based: vim to edit, ma…

>And this doesn't require expensive, licensed software, like Delphi 30 years ago. Delphi wasn't expensive for most of it's life, until they got greedy, and lost the market. Lazarus is the modern open source replacement, it's mostly compatible with Delphi, and $1400 cheaper. ;-)

I programmed in Delphi for years and have done some toy things with Lazarus, so I'm painfully aware of the quality and reliability difference.

It is quite bizarre how us programmers, who make hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, are unwilling to pay $1,400 that will make us more productive.

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#417

Post by andsoitis »

saghm wrote: post #384
thaumasiotes wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> JavaScript has no standard library. >> Math.sin(1.57) 0.9999996829318346 This would be pretty surprising output if there were no standard library.

"No standard library" might be too strong a criticism, but "a dozen or so built-in global variables with various methods" is still probably not the user experience that most desire.

What would you put in the JavaScript library?

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#418

Post by andsoitis »

BurningFrog wrote: post #382
BurningFrog wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The part of Agile a lot of people ignore is the phase when, after your code works, you spend as much time as it takes to make it well structured and readable to others.

BTW, this is the Design Phase in XP! You first write the code, then you design it. Genius!

If you think of code writing as a process of organizing your thoughts, exploring/understanding a domain, and articulating it iteratively (for code/run/debug loop), then your pithy comment seems perfectly rational.

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#419

Post by vlunkr »

_gabe_ wrote: post #385
CodeMage wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon, but it seems to me there's way too much emphasis on speed of development in general. Time to market seems to be more important than quality, robustness, security, performance, or any other concern. Another thing that rubs me wrong is the recurring notion that we need to get rid of the text as a representation of code. I've yet to meet a mathematician who wants to get completely rid o…

> Another thing that rubs me wrong is the recurring notion that we need to get rid of the text as a representation of code. I completely agree with this notion. However, I feel like we're sorely missing out on some form of visual exploration. I feel like the majority of my time is spent trying to understand the flow of execution of a program I'm trying to maintain that was written by other teams that are long gone. I…

Seems like you’re describing architecture or sequence diagrams.

Re: Programming breakthroughs we need

#420

Post by chii »

Jensson wrote: post #392
crummy wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what languages are known for convenient UI development?

The sum language of HTML+JS+CSS, or in other words html files. I haven't seen a better way to write UI in text files, other UI frameworks relies a lot on building the UI in some special editor or aren't easy to use.

HTML as a UI is geared towards making documents and displaying text and graphics in a rigid layout/format.

It's not geared, imho, for a UI with lots of interactivity - e.g., imagine trying to implement blender or an audio processing app (like audacity) in html/css. You'd basically be creating new primitives on top of html, and build your UI on that (or install one of those UI libraries that _renders_ to html).

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