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The End of Coding

alexn.id.au

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Re: The End of Coding

#31

Post by lispylol »

I agree. I think we will continue to abstract our communication with machines until the act of having to type code into a computer is a task that is largely only performed by a small subset of society (programmers).

But even when the day of having to do very minimal physical coding to direct computers arrives, I think there are still many benefits for the majority of people to learning this crude and dated form of coding. Perhaps not necessarily to become programmers, but to at least have some understanding of the guts of machines that power society.

In fact, I think the further removed we get from the physical code in directing machines, the stronger the imperative we have to expect future generations to understand not just what something is, but how and why it works.

Re: The End of Coding

#32

Post by floobynewb »

jtheory wrote: post #10

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, frien…

I honestly don't think you can make it much simpler. That is not to say it is simple, just that it is by nature not simple. You can dress the concepts up, make them look nice with a graphical front end, but really the complexity comes from the abstract notions implicit in functions to be performed. You can tailor things by building libraries of functions to perform common tasks, but these abstractions are never going to be sufficient. What is required is a method of translating from the world we are most familiar with, described by our natural language, into the world described by the language of the computer. The translator needs to understand the context of the natural language requirement and find its correct representation in binary. This is the job of the programmer. An automated solution may well be able to pass the Turing test. That being said, I often think about how to leverage machine learning to help bridge the language gap. Evolving an application is an interesting idea, where the requirements are drip fed to the system through the language of the UI the program should present. Translations from some physical representation, cogs, roads, queues, etc might be useful since it is instinctive to many people yet more precise in its descriptive power than spoken language.

Re: The End of Coding

#33

Post by jdiez17 »

lispylol wrote: post #31

I agree. I think we will continue to abstract our communication with machines until the act of having to type code into a computer is a task that is largely only performed by a small subset of society (programmers). But even when the day of having to do very minimal physical coding to direct computers arrives, I think there are still many benefits for the majority of people to learning this crude and dated form of co…

I wholeheartedly agree. I was talking to my professors the other day about this; I think writing code will have be similar to capturing photographs: before, only professionals could take a picture: they had to operate this complicated machine, and then they had to develop the film in a dark room by impregnating them with chemicals.

Nowadays, most of the population has an immensely capable camera in their pocket. I foresee that something similar will happen with programming. Most people will be able to command their computer and teach them to do new things, without having to know the first thing about how they actually work.

There will still be people that fiddle with data structures and pathfinding algorithms, but they will be doing it for research purposes or because they need a highly specialised application.

Re: The End of Coding

#34

Post by jcutrell »

To accomplish the complexity of issues I face on a daily basis in code, I would hate to build in a GUI.

I can type faster than I can search for the right button in Photoshop. Ask anyone who lives in their terminal - it will increase (rather than decrease) your productivity and agility. This isn't because the gui isn't well made.

I think a better prediction is, writing code and building constructs will be easier. Cognitive overhead will be reduced. That's the design problem - not coding.

Re: The End of Coding

#35

Post by gmjoe »

jtheory wrote: post #10

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, frien…

Exactly. I remember, once a friend wanted to create a tool for designers to use for creating HTML+CSS visually, without having to know actual CSS properties and such.

Then I explained, the hard part of laying out webpages is not the basic layout -- it's how layout reflows when text overflows, when the browser window is too narrow, when image sizes change, what things maintain alignment and what things don't -- and that by the time you've added all these options to your visual tool, the visual tool is now equally complicated as CSS, so you've defeated the whole purpose.

At its heart, it's the fact that the specification of the program is the program. The devil is always in the details. (Which, incidentally, is why it's so hard to estimate development time accurately.)

Re: The End of Coding

#36

Post by Demiurge »

I don't think this is going to happen, even if someone invents direct mind-computer interface. Our thoughts are not precise enough. Everyone who has transcribed a mathematical equation realizes that context free grammar is just the most efficient way to express exactly what we want.

Re: The End of Coding

#37

Post by gshubert17 »

Alex North writes: "For a long time, GUI builders were crap. GUI builders are still crap: they often provide a poor representation of what the rendered interface will look like, are not powerful enough for developers to achieve exactly what they want, and are too complicated and laden with programming concepts for non-programmers to use them."

Beginning about 1995, Borland's Delphi (now CodeGear / Embarcadero) seemed to me to have a pretty nice IDE for making GUIs on Microsoft Windows.

Any opinions on Delphi or information on anything similar for Linux or Mac?

Re: The End of Coding

#38

Post by antimagic »

jtheory wrote: post #10

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, frien…

Yup, it's kind of tedious seeing these types of article / blog post. As anyone that works as a programmer knows, it's not the grammar of programming that is hard. It's understanding the hardware and what it can do that is hard. It's encoding nebulous and sometimes conflicting business requirements into something a computer can understand that is hard. It's taking into account all of the different error states that a process can get into that is hard. Learning the syntax of a programming language? Not hard.

We as programmers have weird brains, compared to most of the population. You give a programmer the list of road rules, and they will probably immediately identify, instinctively, several rules that are mutually exclusive / in conflict with each other. You're able to understand how a home entertainment system needs to be set up, even though that's really not what most programmers do. You identify loopholes in legal frameworks / contracts, because the lawyers that wrote them aren't used to thinking about what has to happen for edge cases.

Re: The End of Coding

#39

Post by lispylol »

jdiez17 wrote: post #33
lispylol wrote: post #31

I agree. I think we will continue to abstract our communication with machines until the act of having to type code into a computer is a task that is largely only performed by a small subset of society (programmers). But even when the day of having to do very minimal physical coding to direct computers arrives, I think there are still many benefits for the majority of people to learning this crude and dated form of co…

I wholeheartedly agree. I was talking to my professors the other day about this; I think writing code will have be similar to capturing photographs: before, only professionals could take a picture: they had to operate this complicated machine, and then they had to develop the film in a dark room by impregnating them with chemicals. Nowadays, most of the population has an immensely capable camera in their pocket. I fo…

Yeah, I think photography is a good analogy for capturing (no pun intended) this trend. And maybe I'm just being overly sentimental, but I feel like because it's so easy to do things with our devices now without knowing how they work, that they're often under-appreciated.

For example, there's this popular interview that Louis C.K did on Conan, where he said "Everything's awesome, and nobody's happy". Sure, most of that frustration can be attributed to the human condition, but ignorance also plays a big role. If people knew (and I don't) how planes actually worked (at at basic level, of course), it's harder to get frustrated about spotty Wifi.

Re: The End of Coding

#40

Post by Zigurd »

I was about to respond to his claims by pointing out that spreadsheets are a gateway drug for coding and that everyone who tries to do things without coding ends up coding.

Code is remarkably universal. The article claims spreadsheets are an example of a post-coding tool, but they, and his other examples, really aren't. Notably, "visual programming" has been a failure. I expect the end of coding to be presaged by things that break the linear symbolic language model. There are no such successful things.

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