I think this article forgot to emphasize the act of reading documentation which probably takes 25% to 50% of the time programming. I think Google and StackOverflow already greatly improved it but maybe there is still room for improvement. Maybe one can crowd source code snippets in a huge Wikipedia-like repository for various languages. I’m imagining a context-sensitive auto-complete and search tool in which one can quickly browse this repository of code snippets which all are prepared to easily adapt to existing variables and function names.
Toward a better programming
51–60 of 191 posts
Re: Toward a better programming
#52The author is correct that programming is currently under-addressing a specific set of use cases: solving problems with conceptually simple models in equally simple ways; in other words, "keep simple programs simple."
However, thinking about computation as only simple programs minimizes the opportunities in the opposite domain: using computation to supplement the inherently fragile and limited modeling that human brains can perform.
While presenting simplicity and understanding can help very much in realizing a simple mental model as a program, it won't help if the program being written is fundamentally beyond the capability of a human brain to model.
The overall approach is very valuable. Tooling can greatly assist both goals, but the tooling one chooses in each domain will vary greatly.
Re: Toward a better programming
#53I alternate between thinking that programming has improved tremendously in the past 30 years, and thinking that programming has gone nowhere. On the positive side, things that were cutting-edge hard problems in the 80s are now homework assignments or fun side projects. For instance, write a ray tracer, a spreadsheet, Tetris, or an interactive GUI. On the negative side, there seems to be a huge amount of stagnation in…
The problem isn't in my opinion that people still use languages and environments from the 1980's. It's that the modern languages and environments aren't really any better. If anything, they're worse.
Re: Toward a better programming
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People are still typing the same Unix commands into 25x80 terminal windows. People are still using vi to edit programs as sequential lines of text in files using languages from the 80s (C++) or 90s (Java). Well yes, there are always people who stick to the older methods, or sometimes the situation calls for programming through a terminal window, but there have been big advancements since those methods, like the gre…
> Why do you say programming has gone nowhere because there are people who don't use the newer advancements? Speaking for myself, its because Visual Studio and its ilk don't feel like advancements. They feel like bandaids. They do their damnedest to reduce the pain of programming by automatically producing boilerplate, auto completing words, providing documentation, and providing dozens of ways to jump around text fi…
> ...while discussing pointers and garbage collection and optimizing heap allocation
People still do that?
We still use 'if' and 'then', but higher level languages like Ruby and Python have eliminated pointers and their ilk from day-to-day discussion, relegating heap allocation discussion to the halls of specialized conferences, while many programmers go about their day-to-day activities skipping over the pain of garbage collection.
They may not win language shootout speed tests, but they remove a lot of programmer pain and help with how long it takes to write code.
Re: Toward a better programming
#55I liked the part of the article concerning "what is programming" and how we seemingly see ourselves plumbers and glue makers - mashing together various parts and trying to get them to work.
I felt that the article takes a somewhat depressing view. Sure, these days we probably do all spend a lot of time getting two pieces of code written by others to work together. The article suggests there's no fun or creativity in that, but I find it plenty interesting. I see it as standing on the shoulders of giants, rather than just glumly fitting pipes together. It's the payoff of reusable code and modular systems. I happily use pre-made web servers, operating systems, network stack, code libraries etc. Even though it can be frustrating at times when things don't work, in the end my creations wouldn't even be possible without these things.
Re: Toward a better programming
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, there are plenty of cases where visualization is helpful. But I see so many blog posts about it, and not much in the way of actual progress. Take the card again. It's your example, after all. I cannot think of any way to use that to, say, write a small AI to play poker. I suppose I could see a use in a debugging situation for my 'hand' variable to display a little 5@ symbol (where @ is the suit symbol). But oka…
> So I need a graphics designer to make a symbol for a card. I think this is the crux of the debate. The point isn't high quality visualizations, it's about bringing the simple little pictures you'd draw to solve your problem directly into the environment. Can you draw a box and put some text in it? Tada! Your own little representation of a card. I'm not suggesting that you hire people out to build your representatio…
I'm optimistic that your team is making real progress behind the scenes, but please remember that when you say 'do some math' some of us think 'discontinuous galerkin' instead of 'add one'. Not that everyone needs to, but one reason the early pioneers made such great progress is that they were building tools to solve truly challenging problems. The fact that we can build TODO lists in 40 seconds today is incidental.
Re: Toward a better programming
#57Leibniz wrote in 1666:
"We have spoken of the art of complication of the sciences, i.e., of inventive logic... But when the tables of categories of our art of complication have been formed, something greater will emerge. For let the first terms, of the combination of which all others consist, be designated by signs; these signs will be a kind of alphabet. It will be convenient for the signs to be as natural as possible—e.g., for one, a point; for numbers, points; for the relations of one entity with another, lines; for the variation of angles and of extremities in lines, kinds of relations. If these are correctly and ingeniously established, this universal writing will be as easy as it is common,and will be capable of being read without any dictionary; at the same time, a fundamental knowledge of all things will be obtained. The whole of such a writing will be made of geometrical figures, as it were, and of a kind of pictures — just as the ancient Egyptians did, and the Chinese do today. Their pictures, however, are not reduced to a fixed alphabet... with the result that a tremendous strain on the memory is necessary, which is the contrary of what we propose"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristica_universalis
Re: Toward a better programming
#58Toward a better computer UI
The Aurora demo did not look like a big improvement until maybe http://youtu.be/L6iUm_Cqx2s?t=7m54s where the TodoMVC demo beats even Polymer in LOC count and readability.
I've been thinking of similar new "programming" as the main computer UI, to ensure it's easy to use and the main UI people know. Forget Steve Jobs and XEROX, they threw out the baby with the bath water.
Using a computer is really calling some functions, typing some text input in between, calling some more.
Doing a few common tasks today is
opening a web browser
clicking Email
reading some
replying
getting a reply back, possibly a notification
clicking HN
commenting on an article in a totally different UI than email
going to threads tab manually to see any response
FaceTwitterEtsyRedditHN fiefdoms proliferate because of the separation between the XEROX GUI and calling a bunch of functions in Command Line. Siri and similar AI agents are the next step in simple UIs. What people really want to do is
tell Dustin you don't agree with his assessment of Facebook's UI changes
type/voice your disagreement
share with public
type it
share message with Dustin and his circle of designers/hackers
sentiment analysis of comments about Dustin's article compared to mine
Today's UI would involve going to a cute blog service because it has a proper visual template. This requires being one of the cool kids and knowing of this service. Then going to Goolge+ or email for the more private message. Then opening up an IDE or some text sentiment API and going through their whole other world of incantations.
Our glue/CRUD programming is a mess because using computers in general is a mess.
Re: Toward a better programming
#59I think a lot could be won by reducing complexity of the systems. In modern operating systems we stack too many abstraction layers ontop of each other. Emacs is a great example of a development environment which prevents a lot of complexity because everything is written in one language (Emacs Lisp), functions are available throughout the system, one can rewrite functions at runtime and one can easily pinpoint the source code of any function with the find-function command. It would actually be great to have an operating system as simple, extensible and flexible.
Re: Toward a better programming
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
"[Graphical languages] work extremely well as limited languages for very constrained problems" Even that might need a citation...
A few examples of graphical programming languages are LabView, Scratch, and Lego Mindstorms (NXT). (I'm not advocating graphical programming, just providing examples.) Edit: maybe graphical GUI editors such as in Xcode and Visual Studio could be considered tools for programming languages that are partially graphical and partially text based.
Would you include PLC programming? It's safe to say that's been pretty successful in industrial settings.