The End of Coding

Call me skeptical. Virtually everyone who has spent more than a few years programming can attest that it has, at the very least, opened a new dimension of logical thinking and problem-solving that is not easily found in other fields. I think the challenge of creating an interface to this kind of thinking that is friendly to non-coders is difficult enough...but the idea that once these tools are made, they'll grok what to do? Hmmm...We're much closer to a future where machine readers can read all manner of text out loud, but does that mean there's little use for teaching literacy?

edit: Here's an example - I recently got done teaching a data basics class, and inevitably, my students ran into the problem of data typing in Excel...you type in something like "9/14" into a field, and it treats it like a date, and moreover, displays it as "Sep-14". But when you try to concatenate the field, or perform some other kind of operation on it that is not date-related, Excel treats it as an integer (number of days since 1904, or something like that).

So Microsoft has arguably done something user-friendly here...virtually anyone who types in '9/14' probably means September 14, 2013. However, this isn't always the case, and if it isn't, you have to know how to format columns in Excel as text. Moreover, the operations upon date types are not at all intuitive. If you've done a minimal level of programming, you get the idea of data types, including dates and strings. Let's pretend Microsoft comes up with a way to perfectly guess what you mean when you've typed in a value...is it possible this will eliminate the need for the average user to have an understanding of data types in order to do non-trivial work?

As the site now says "Error establishing a database connection " maybe the coding was ended a little too early?

Overaggressive learning algorithms can in some cases be more annoying than well thought out defaults. Especially since they won't be consistent (at least at first). Its not an easy thing to do right. For things like spreadsheet formatting, you want to have consistent behavior that you can rely on.

I guess the difference is that what google does is already somewhat fuzzy, when you search for something you're not necessarily even sure what you want the search engine to return. We also don't expect the results to necessarily be perfect which is why the search engine returns more than one result.

On the other hand when you're trying to do some specific task you already know in most cases exactly what you want to happen, so if it does something else then that is very frustrating.

I feel like I've been reading this article every year, with some variation but the same yet-unrealized potential every time.

I'm not an expert in "human" coding or AI, but I get the same vibe from both of them -- until you try it yourself, it seems pretty reasonable that someone will solve this problem fairly soon. And it has seemed that way for many years now.

Simple CRUD apps can already be built with simple, friendly interfaces. The simple apps will continue to get easier for non-programmers to assemble without "coding".

But real life requirements get comlicated soon -- your simple CRUD app now needs to auto-charge customers every time they foo 100 bars, unless it's been less than a month (in which case you charge a prorated total at month end), and early subscribers are grandfathered in to a simple fixed monthly charge. How will you click-and-drag that? Or explain it clearly in natural language, without multiple possible interpretations?

People make complicated stuff in Excel spreadsheets, and while it starts off as fairly vanilla, it quickly becomes something as complicated (if not more so) than writing a standard computer program in code.

Natural language serves a purpose -- mostly around navigating complicated social situations, including expressing general desires to others (who have motivations of their own, and will interpret according to their own internal rules). It's fuzzy and generally non-specific because that's how we are.

Why do we imagine our normal ways of interacting with each other can be applied to instructing a process to execute complex & strict logic?

I'm pretty sure we can make progress -- clean up the leakiest abstractions from software to APIs to hardware... -- and sort out the best way to build coding languages so they are as intuitive as possible for humans -- but I don't think "code" generally is going to disappear anytime soon.