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What Is Code?

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Re: What Is Code?

#131

Post by samspot »

spb wrote: post #102

"How often are you going to be multiplying sevens and cats? Soooo much." Where the fuck does this meme of "fundamental type mismatches come up all the time in ordinary code" come from? What kind of defective system are people writing where it's normal for strings and numbers to be interpreted relationally (even accidentally)? It sounds like the author is trying to demonstrate the significance of things like syntax tr…

On the web it's sort of all strings, so it's not hard to be in a situation where you have "length=7" & "cat=tabby" and get into a problem. Beyond that, many developers are in the habit of using primitives for everything, which makes these sorts of errors much more common.

Re: What Is Code?

#132

Post by Dewie3 »

fragmede wrote: post #101
tolmasky wrote: post #91

Earlier 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…

Two other more contemporary examples are the Android app Tasker, and the website IFTTT ( https://ifttt.com/ ). There's something about calling it programming that turns certain people off. I remember a story about a freshman in a physical mechanics class that complained about all the MATLAB code they had to write. The professors retort was that they were free to use a slide rule instead, and that particular freshman…

Kind of like how calling programs for proofs seems to make most programmers uneasy. (Not that most programs that you'll run into are proofs in any interesting sense.)

Re: What Is Code?

#133

Post by transpy »

Confusion wrote: post #115
tolmasky wrote: post #91

Earlier 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…

So, Excel is not coding, but an Excel sheet can have bugs?

Re: What Is Code?

#134

Post by michaelvkpdx »

Intro articles like this do a lot to reveal biases and misunderstandings. Like with Java.

The article says "Java= enterprise" but I can tell you the best user experiences I ever saw delivered over the web were those done with Java Web Start (not applets- applications launched in a JVM from the web). I developed several in the day that continued to run for years- because users loved them and they were safe and secure.

Why Web Start didn't take over, I have no idea. It was also a superb platform for mobile delivery.

Re: What Is Code?

#135

Post by Confusion »

navait wrote: post #129
Confusion wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, and that is exactly what very rarely happens when people use Photoshop or Excel and happens in coding all the time. Which isn't strange, because the former two aren't intended for that, while the latter is.

I think it can matter a lot whether the tools are predefined, because the exact nature of those predefined tools determines whether they are easily composed into something greater than the sum of its parts. You need iron ore, wood and a forge to construct a different hammer. Of course you can cobble something hammer-like together with the tools in your toolbox at home, but it won't be like the hammer forged afresh from more fundamental parts better suited for that purpose.

Re: What Is Code?

#136

Post by seanp2k2 »

scrumper wrote: post #105
tolmasky wrote: post #91

Earlier 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…

Excel is a perfect example. The core Excel experience is basically functional programming on a virtual machine with a matrix address space laid out visually right in front of you. It even looks like traditional programming if you dive into the VBA stuff, which plenty of non-technical specialists, including MBAs and managers, do on a regular basis in the pursuit of solving their problems. Any specialist user willing t…

+1; many companies have tons of internal processes which rely on Excel sheets. When these become painful enough, another team (internal applications) can come in, evaluate the situation, and build out a custom solution which uses an actual database, but Excel still provides a ton of value, since at the most basic level it's a database table with no validation and a free-form schema.

The downside is, when all you have are Excel sheets, everything looks like rows and columns (and not e.g. objects with behaviors). If Excel had more robust import/export mechanisms that normal users could understand (e.g. built-in REST client with JSON + XML serializers + many database adapters w/ lots of helpful wizards or tools to guide you), it'd be way more powerful. Then again, if someone is at the point where they'd be able to look at some JSON and compare it with their spreadsheet and be able to describe the mappings, they're possibly better off going to some training sessions on ${your favorite programming language} to learn how to do this the easy way.

Re: What Is Code?

#137

Post by randyrand »

arxpoetica wrote: post #49

> 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.

AI that takes natural language as input as spits out binaries for you =P

Re: What Is Code?

#138

Post by spb »

michaelvkpdx wrote: post #134

Intro articles like this do a lot to reveal biases and misunderstandings. Like with Java. The article says "Java= enterprise" but I can tell you the best user experiences I ever saw delivered over the web were those done with Java Web Start (not applets- applications launched in a JVM from the web). I developed several in the day that continued to run for years- because users loved them and they were safe and secure.…

> Intro articles like this do a lot to reveal biases and misunderstandings.

This is one of the reasons I barely recommend any intro articles in Lean Notes (http://www.leannotes.com/): almost every single one is just a stream of incomplete and incorrect statements about how the world works, based on the author's myopic personal experiences.

Rather than properly generalizing and consolidating what needs to be said to convey a full understanding of the topic, most intros settle for the first example they can think of that could be remotely construed as related to the words they've previously used for whatever subject, regardless of whether it has meaning in any context. (Example: saying that type safety prevents you from trying to "multiply seven by cats".)

It seems like a pretty Dunning-Kruger thing: the less broad your knowledge is, the more justified you feel in writing an introductory text to the field.

The only time I've ever seen somebody actually qualified to write an introductory text actually doing so (as I can immediately recall) is Charles Petzold's [Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software][Code] (although I suspect, from the few excerpts of it I've seen, that Brian Kernighan's "D is for Digital" is good, too).

[Code]: http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softwa...

Re: What Is Code?

#139

Post by morganvachon »

spb wrote: post #114
ryandrake wrote: post #108

It'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…

There are always going to be people like this, in any field. TSR (of Dungeons & Dragons fame) actually had a CEO who forbid her employees from playtesting their products during work hours, calling it "playing games on company time." http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Lorraine_Williams

Dear God, what a disconnect. How does someone with that line of thinking even get a job in the gaming industry?

Then again, I'm reminded of a boss I used to have who would ask me to fix the shipping calculator on our web server, then ten minutes later he would poke his head in the door and tell me to "quit playing on the goddamn computer and get some work done!" He didn't realize that "working on the web server" is done at a workstation, not physically taking the server (remotely hosted of course) apart and putting it back together. All he knew was the customers were complaining about the shopping cart module not calculating shipping correctly.

Re: What Is Code?

#140

Post by ForHackernews »

tolmasky wrote: post #91
arxpoetica wrote: post #49

> 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'm not sure I agree with you about Photoshop. Perhaps (probably) there are photoshop macros or pipelines that are closer to programming, but most people use Photoshop purely in an interactive mode. They enter commands directly, and the logic stays in the users' heads, not in the computer.

Photoshop is more like a REPL tied to an image-processing library than it is a programming language.

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