The article ended up just yanking my Firefox session to somewhere in the middle of the page, followed by some Clippy expy nagging me about how fast I'm supposedly reading the article.
What Is Code?
121–130 of 368 posts
Re: What Is Code?
#122I'm glad I came here to read the comments that urged me to read on, because I stopped at the point where the VP was whining that his job was on the line and the software guy's wasn't. Made me a little sick to my stomach. In what company is that ever the case? Even if the VP's job is lost (rare occurrence in my experience), the severance package is more than the software person's salary for a year is.
My understanding was that the development manager in the taup blazer was an IT consultant brought in to run the project making it a little easier for that person to disappear to the next gig no matter how disastrous the project turned out.
That's what I was thinking too. But then they seem like employees in the rest of the story. A little ambiguous.
Re: What Is Code?
#123> There have been countless attempts to make software easier to write...Decades of efforts have gone into helping civilians write code...Nothing yet has done away with developers, developers, developers, developers. I still believe. Someday, somewhere, something incredible will emerge for the right-brained bourgeoisie and literati.
Theres tons of successes, we just refuse to count them. Photoshop (as hinted in the article), is a super special purpose language for doing image operations. It no longer "looks" like coding, so we don't count it as coding for the masses. Excel is a much more general purpose language used by tons of "non-coders" (and arguably the most popular programming language on earth). Again, doesn't (often) look like normal pro…
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Re: What Is Code?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Theres tons of successes, we just refuse to count them. Photoshop (as hinted in the article), is a super special purpose language for doing image operations. It no longer "looks" like coding, so we don't count it as coding for the masses. Excel is a much more general purpose language used by tons of "non-coders" (and arguably the most popular programming language on earth). Again, doesn't (often) look like normal pro…
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To me "programming" is text-based.
I'm afraid your interpretation of programming is an exceptionally heterodox one, then. It would make visual programming an oxymoron, which is at odds with most research.
Re: What Is Code?
#125It's 2015. The audience of this article shouldn't even exist. The reader, as described in the article, is a VP who has so little understanding about what it is his company does, that the only meaningful abstraction he can mentally picture is that of his employees "burning barrels of money". Imagine an auto company VP who says "I don't know anything about engines and drivetrains and all that technical stuff. All I kno…
You're living in a pretty isolated world, my friend. I'd say 90% of my friends would be the audience for this. I've been coding 20 years, most of my friends are successful, grad-degree educated people in a variety of fields, and some of them are even my coworkers.
Who is supposed to teach people what code is? Our schools? Who with a CS degree and programming experience would willfully choose to teach in the USA's education system?
Or maybe the companies who make all their money from code? I think not- it wouldn't help the economic position of Apple, Google, FB, or Microsoft if everyone knew what code is and how it works. It strengthens the tech economy's stranglehold on society when code is treated as something inscrutable.
So there's really very few resources for people- even educated, successful, technically literate folk- to grok "what is code?"
Many coders would do well to read a similar article, if there was one, called, "What is Society?"
Re: What Is Code?
#126> There have been countless attempts to make software easier to write...Decades of efforts have gone into helping civilians write code...Nothing yet has done away with developers, developers, developers, developers. I still believe. Someday, somewhere, something incredible will emerge for the right-brained bourgeoisie and literati.
Love it or hate it, Meteor has empowered a number of sales-types and small-business owners to create real tools to solve their own real problems. I've seen it happen in front of my own eyes!
I omitted: ...and create so many new problems there will be years of work in it to clean the mess up.
Been in "IT" for a few decades, I've seen it happen in front of my own eyes time and time again.
The only self-help tool that has lasted so far has been the spreadsheet, and even that has gone horribly off the rails in many companies.
Re: What Is Code?
#127> There have been countless attempts to make software easier to write...Decades of efforts have gone into helping civilians write code...Nothing yet has done away with developers, developers, developers, developers. I still believe. Someday, somewhere, something incredible will emerge for the right-brained bourgeoisie and literati.
Theres tons of successes, we just refuse to count them. Photoshop (as hinted in the article), is a super special purpose language for doing image operations. It no longer "looks" like coding, so we don't count it as coding for the masses. Excel is a much more general purpose language used by tons of "non-coders" (and arguably the most popular programming language on earth). Again, doesn't (often) look like normal pro…
I concur with your assesment. The point is not to turn a syntax into an AST into processor code. The point is to provide things of value and 'easy' computing platforms targeting users who are not professional programmers create tremendous amounts of end user value.
Sadly, when I point this out professional programmers often go 'pffft - that's not real programmming' as if being knees deep in stack traces and gigantic code bases was a something with intrinsic value.
Re: What Is Code?
#128> There have been countless attempts to make software easier to write...Decades of efforts have gone into helping civilians write code...Nothing yet has done away with developers, developers, developers, developers. I still believe. Someday, somewhere, something incredible will emerge for the right-brained bourgeoisie and literati.
"something incredible will emerge for the right-brained bourgeoisie and literati."
Yes, a real quantum computer. As long as we're dealing with 1's and 0's, there's an insurmountable barrier for those who would get creative with computing.
Re: What Is Code?
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Theres tons of successes, we just refuse to count them. Photoshop (as hinted in the article), is a super special purpose language for doing image operations. It no longer "looks" like coding, so we don't count it as coding for the masses. Excel is a much more general purpose language used by tons of "non-coders" (and arguably the most popular programming language on earth). Again, doesn't (often) look like normal pro…
I would say that Photoshop is a toolbox of predefined tools. If using that is coding, then people are also coding when they choose and use a screwdriver, some sandpaper, a hammer and some glue in succession from their physical toolbox to get a job done. That the operations happen electronically and that they are implemented as complex mathematical transformations of pixels doesn't change that. Excel isn't much differ…
Well, if you wanted to be absurdly pedantic, you could call instructions in an architecture predefined tools, or protons and electrons.
I don't think it matters if the tools are predefined - what matters is that they can be used together to build a system greater than the sum of it's parts.
Re: What Is Code?
#130> There have been countless attempts to make software easier to write...Decades of efforts have gone into helping civilians write code...Nothing yet has done away with developers, developers, developers, developers. I still believe. Someday, somewhere, something incredible will emerge for the right-brained bourgeoisie and literati.
I don't understand why people believe 'everyone' should be able to write code without much trouble. Virtually every activity requires focus and exercise to learn. Example: you can't just take a hammer and start building furniture or you will create a mess. If you want something nice and useful, you need to think about what you want to build, how you are going to construct it, which materials you need, which tools you need. You need to experience how the materials behave, try out certain subconstructions, research what specialized tools exist. I believe this idea that 'everyone' should be able to code is like expecting everyone to be able to build furniture. If you want to, you can learn how to build furniture, but it's not easy and will never be easy. Why would coding be any different?