Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers • Hacker News Board

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#61

Post by skydhash » Wed, Jun 12, 2024, 1:26 AM UTC

charlie0 wrote: post #46

thebeardisred wrote: post #43

With all due respect to the author, I take umbrage with the statement "They never end up in the terminal, because that is a huge jump in complexity, usability, and frustration from using something like Airtable or Notion." Using the command line isn't more complex, it's differently complex. It's differently complex and writ large, schools make no effort to teach it.

The "huge jump in complexity, usability" refers to not being able to use a mouse, which a lot of people find intimidating for some reason.

I've rarely seen cashiers use their mouse. The issue is training. And the terminal lands you directly in the guts of the computer. The mouse is safe because there's limited actions you can do with it. But people are OK with learning the keybindings for whatever game they want to play. What's distressing is when the software changes randomly after an update. Imagine retraining from Office 2003 to 2007 with the ribbon. Or windows 7 to Windows 8.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#62

Post by skydhash » Wed, Jun 12, 2024, 1:30 AM UTC

ubertaco wrote: post #13

skadamat wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, from my POV, the licensing part of this is only a small part of the puzzle. Open source software that’s insanely complex to run and is developed like industrial software still doesn’t make it amenable for home cooking / barefoot use. The bigger limiter is the missing culture of deliberately small and individualized software to specific people, families, or small communities. That’s the mindset Maggie is trying…

Exactly. Licensing is the easy part. Deploy + run are the hard parts, IMO. You can build something amazing like Immich, a shining example of open-source software that, after a lot of setup, "just works"....until the next release wants you to make well-informed decisions to your `docker-compose.yaml` file. My wife, who likes Immich but has no interest in learning to code, is not going to do those things if I get hit b…

There's a lot of complexity to software and you either learn how it works or find someone that does. And it's not a tangible item like a car, where you can intuit your way around.

But I much prefer to host something locally and give my family access than letting them suffer the whims of big tech.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#63

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jun 12, 2024, 1:41 AM UTC

skydhash wrote: post #58

throwanem wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not conceived as an LLM dependency, but really more similar to the way I currently use LLMs as an engineer: as a consultant. I don't think current models are up to that task on their own, certainly not for someone without significant programming knowledge - but the sense I got, especially as the talk touched on still needing access to a skilled dev for a while at least, was that the author also understands this.…

The thing is you can learn a lot with a bootable FreeBSD usb, an old PC and a copy of the "Absolute FreeBSD" or the equivalent for Linux. I strongly believe that anyone who is not willing to put in the time to learn those stuff won't be able to do anything custom with computers. Shortcut has been there for years now and most people haven't touch it. Many only learn a few actions that apps provide and are content. The…

[deleted]

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#64

Post by Turing_Machine » Wed, Jun 12, 2024, 1:43 AM UTC

9dev wrote: post #30

Turing_Machine wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just because it’s so intent on satisfying your whim instead of saying No This really, really, really needs to be fixed. It's probably the most irritating (and potentially risky) part of the whole ecosystem. Nothing more infuriating than being give code that not only doesn't work, but upon the most casual inspection, couldn't possibly work -- especially when it's done it four or five times in a row, each time assuri…

“You‘re right, I apologize for the oversight. Let’s do the same bloody thing exactly the same way again because I don’t know how to answer your question differently but am forced to never admit that…“

Sometimes it goes in circles, fixing one problem, but unfixing one that it had fixed in the previous iteration. I've had that happen several times.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#65

Post by llm_trw » Wed, Jun 12, 2024, 1:47 AM UTC

theamk wrote: post #56

llm_trw wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Depending on the way you phrase questions, ChatGPT will gleefully suggest you a wrong approach, just because it’s so intent on satisfying your whim instead of saying No when it would be appropriate. Which is easily solved by using another agent that is told to be critical and find all flaws in the suggested approach.

Not likely. Have you seen AI code review tools? They are just as bad as any other AI products - it has a similar chance of fixing a defect or introducing a new one.

They are not there to fix defect, they are there to detect them.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#66

Post by Bjorkbat » Wed, Jun 12, 2024, 1:50 AM UTC

liampulles wrote: post #31

Unpopular opinion inbound: what will spark a barefoot developer revolution is not LLM auto-coding, its making spreadsheet software more easily extendable and FUN. By extendable, I mean doing things like generating and sending emails, and using plugins to integrate with external services. By fun, I mean non-enterprisey, something that one would WANT to engage in as a hobby and that a total novice can pick up and gradu…

I largely agree with you. Spreadsheets are arguably the most successful no-code/low-code tool out there in that they've enabled millions of people to automate some task or complex process and effectively become programmers, despite the fact that I personally find an empty spreadsheet to be kind of intimidating to look at.

I think the only point of disagreement we might have is that I don't necessarily think that the speadsheet, even an improved one, is the best graphical model/structure for articulating complex processes, but it seems to be the best we've discovered thus far.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#67

Post by Bjorkbat » Wed, Jun 12, 2024, 1:57 AM UTC

skadamat wrote: post #19

For people who want more examples of this “vibe”, here’s a tiny subset of places / people / projects to check out: https://futureofcoding.org/catalog/ https://cristobal.space/writing/folk-computer.html https://dynamicland.org/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/ https://www.geoffreylitt.com/ https://maggieappleton.com/folk-interfaces

Kind of funny that someone's syllabus from a class taught in 2015 has done more to broaden my mind concerning speculative computing futures and "what-ifs" than anything else I've come across.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#68

Post by titanomachy » Wed, Jun 12, 2024, 2:01 AM UTC

charlie0 wrote: post #45

Sounds great, but this won't work out to the way the author imagines it. We have a very strong bias towards anything technical, but if you've ever worked outside the SWE field, you'll see that half of the people simply aren't interested in "thinking". They don't like or enjoy their jobs. They sure as hell aren't going to sit there and think, "how do I take this problem and break it down into a dozen/hundreds of small…

> outside of the SWE field... half of the people simply aren't interested in "thinking"

This is probably true of SWEs as well (although in some places it's hard to get away without thinking at least a bit.)

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#69

Post by seabird » Wed, Jun 12, 2024, 2:03 AM UTC

People just don't care and won't do it if it requires more than a fleeting thought to get it done. Excel is comically powerful and only a tiny fraction of users have any interest in tapping into that. Every step of the way, for the last 50 years, pretty much all parties involved have actively worked to move away from end-user programming.

Words can't describe how happy I would be if that wasn't the case, but it's better to walk than curse the road. Changing this would require pretty much everybody on the planet to re-evaluate how they interact with a computer, and I'm not holding out on that.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#70

Post by intelVISA » Wed, Jun 12, 2024, 2:07 AM UTC

charlie0 wrote: post #45

Sounds great, but this won't work out to the way the author imagines it. We have a very strong bias towards anything technical, but if you've ever worked outside the SWE field, you'll see that half of the people simply aren't interested in "thinking". They don't like or enjoy their jobs. They sure as hell aren't going to sit there and think, "how do I take this problem and break it down into a dozen/hundreds of small…

> outside the SWE field, you'll see that half of the people simply aren't interested in "thinking"

Whereas inside it's closer to 90% :/