Toward a better programming • Hacker News Board

Re: Toward a better programming

#61

Post by jamii » Fri, Mar 28, 2014, 9:34 PM UTC

krapp wrote: post #48

wvenable wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to think of it as evolution: new ideas that succeed and improve performance multiply, new ideas that fail disappear, and old ideas that are still efficient live on. People still typing the same Unix commands into terminals do it because it's still the most efficient way to accomplish those things. Maybe it's always going to be the optimal solution for some tasks. Just because an idea is old, doesn't mean it's…

Text as code, for instance, is just an extension of a concept which has been around in one form or another since the scribes of ancient Babylon, or thereabouts. I can imagine more complex ways of representing code but I can't really imagine anything more efficient for translating human concepts into machine language. Except maybe direct, augmented telepathy, but even then people would probably think to the computer i…

The problem with code as text is not the visual representation but the manipulation. From the point of view of tooling for live-coding, it's incredibly painful to deal with an unstructured pile of text that at any given point may be in an invalid state (ie partially edited). Structured editing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_editor) allows the tooling to deal with consistent, structured data whilst still taking advantage of the expressive power of language.

Re: Toward a better programming

#62

Post by gregw134 » Fri, Mar 28, 2014, 9:34 PM UTC

bachback wrote: post #57

Leibniz 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 possib…

You might like The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing http://www.amazon.com/The-Universal-Computer-Leibniz-Turing/...

Re: Toward a better programming

#63

Post by jimmaswell » Fri, Mar 28, 2014, 9:36 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #49

jimmaswell wrote: post #29

Earlier 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…

>The main source of the pain is, to me, is that we're still working strictly with textual representations of non-textual concepts and logic, no matter how those concepts might better be rendered.

I can't see any issue with representing logic abstractly with symbols. It's the same for calculus. Of course the ideas we're representing aren't actually the things we use to represent them, the same as written communication.

Non-textual programming has been explored to some degree, such as Scratch, but it's not seen as much of a useful thing.

>Instead of solving the problem, we're stuck down describing actions and formulas to the machinery. No IDE does anything to actually address that problem.

Describing actions and formulas to a machine in order to make it do something useful is pretty much the definition of programming. IDEs make it a more convenient process.

Unless you want to directly transplant the ideas out of your neural paths into the computer, maybe some AI computer in the future based on a human brain, this is how it's going to be.

Re: Toward a better programming

#64

Post by NAFV_P » Fri, Mar 28, 2014, 9:39 PM UTC

> Writing a program is an error-prone exercise in translation. Even math, from which our programming languages are born, has to be translated into something like this:

The article then compares some verbose C++ with a mathematical equation. That is hardly a fair comparison, the C++ code can be written and read by a human in a text editor, right click the equation > inspect element ... it's a gif. I loaded the gif into a text editor, it's hardcore gibberish.

Personally, I would stick with the verbose C++.

Re: Toward a better programming

#65

Post by jowiar » Fri, Mar 28, 2014, 9:41 PM UTC

kens wrote: post #17

I 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…

That's pretty much the thesis of Bret Victor's "The Future of Programming" talk. It's here, for all who have missed it: http://worrydream.com/dbx/

Re: Toward a better programming

#66

Post by jimmaswell » Fri, Mar 28, 2014, 9:45 PM UTC

deckiedan wrote: post #45

jimmaswell wrote: post #29

Earlier 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…

That's kind of the thing... that there are other ways of programming (IDE instead of text editor), but for interesting languages, there's no clear cut proof that IDEs are actually better. For languages specifically such as Java, which have very verbose syntax, and huge amounts of boilerplate for large projects, then sure, an IDE is an improvement. But even IDEs, really, haven't much changed. And the fact that we even…

How are you defining an "interesting" language? Just your opinion? I'd say C# is a pretty interesting and powerful language that's extremely well-complemented by VS.

There's a lot more to an IDE than code generation and autocomplete (even if those are very useful and save me a ton of time). Finding all references to a variable or function (simple text searching does not do this nearly as well - the IDE actually analyzes the language and knows what points to what). Immediately letting you know if the syntax is wrong. Very visual and intuitive debugging (it goes to the line # and lets you hover over a variable to see its contents). Jumping to a variable's definition.

There have been experiments with non-textual programming, such as Scratch, but it hasn't really proven to be very useful. If there's going to be some radical shift, it might come from AI and brain scanners maybe?

Re: Toward a better programming

#67

Post by gregw134 » Fri, Mar 28, 2014, 9:47 PM UTC

sanderjd wrote: post #30

analyst74 wrote: post #12

I am optimistic about our field. Things have not stayed stale for the past 20~30 years, in fact, state of programming have not stayed stale even in the recent 10 years. We've been progressively solving problems we face, inventing tools, languages, frameworks to make our lives easier. Which further allows us to solve more complicated problems, or similar problems faster. Problems we face now, like concurrency, big dat…

Yeah it's interesting, every time I hear "software has been stagnant for decades!", I think to myself that my god, it's hard enough to keep up with the stagnant state of things, I can't imagine trying to keep up with actual progress!

But that's exactly why programming is stagnant--it hasn't gotten simpler.

Re: Toward a better programming

#68

Post by jonathanedwards » Fri, Mar 28, 2014, 9:49 PM UTC

ibdknox wrote: post #25

scribu wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you ensure you don't lose all the good properties you gain from the domain specific languages/editors when passing between them? That's a very interesting (and I'm betting hard to solve) problem! However, it's very hard for me to see how Aurora would help with that. From the demo, it looks like yet another visual programming system; such systems don't seem particularly interoperable.

The clever part of the strategy I was using in that demo was that all domains are expressed declaratively as datastructures. This meant that the glue language only needed to be very good at manipulating vectors and maps. You built up a structure that represented music, html, or whatever and then just labeled it as such. Interop between domains then becomes pretty simplistic data transformation from one domain's forma…

Here's some meat. So how does FP fall down?

Re: Toward a better programming

#69

Post by Detrus » Fri, Mar 28, 2014, 9:50 PM UTC

sanderjd wrote: post #30

analyst74 wrote: post #12

I am optimistic about our field. Things have not stayed stale for the past 20~30 years, in fact, state of programming have not stayed stale even in the recent 10 years. We've been progressively solving problems we face, inventing tools, languages, frameworks to make our lives easier. Which further allows us to solve more complicated problems, or similar problems faster. Problems we face now, like concurrency, big dat…

Yeah it's interesting, every time I hear "software has been stagnant for decades!", I think to myself that my god, it's hard enough to keep up with the stagnant state of things, I can't imagine trying to keep up with actual progress!

Keeping up with actual progress should be easier. The current "stagnant" state could be called that because your attention is wasted on miracle cures that promise the moon, but mostly deliver a minor improvement or make things worse.

Re: Toward a better programming

#70

Post by phantomb » Fri, Mar 28, 2014, 9:54 PM UTC

Historically it has been easy to claim that programming is merely incidentally complex but hard to actually produce working techniques that can dispel the complexity.

The truth is that programming is one of the most complex human undertakings by nature, and many of the difficulties faced by programmers - such as the invisible and unvisualizable nature of software - are intractable.

There are still no silver bullets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet http://faculty.salisbury.edu/~xswang/Research/Papers/SERelat...