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What Is Code?

bloomberg.com

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Re: What Is Code?

#151

Post by rinon »

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…

Most VP's do not sell computers (or even software). They sell goods and services that depend on computers. What you're saying is more like "a VP at UPS or FedEx should understand everything about engines." That's ridiculous, you don't need to understand how trucks work to know they move goods from point A to point B.

Re: What Is Code?

#152

Post by igravious »

pavlov wrote: post #11
igravious wrote: post #5

This is too freaking awesome! Isn't that a seriously mind-bendy kind of article to appear on Bloomberg? Also, isn't it very cool that a whole class of people who may not know a thing about coding (but may be interested) might get to know something about the craft and culture? And it's presented in a very fun, off-kilter sort of way. That must have been a hell of a lot of work. I actually skimmed the second half and t…

Apple's App Store is the Etsy of software.

I was thinking that. But then why is software-dev-as-craft cordoned off from jewellery-making-as-craft and print-making-as-craft and so on. What makes software so special it needs its own little commercial corner of the world? Serious question :)

Re: What Is Code?

#154

Post by spb »

samspot wrote: post #131
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.

Yes, it's possible to have strings for two different things. In what world are those strings going to be cross-evaluated?

Re: What Is Code?

#155

Post by Tenhundfeld »

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…

What? I imagine there are many, many auto manufacturing VP's who think, "I don't know anything about engines and drivetrains and all that technical stuff [– and I don't need to]."

Why should the VP of Human Resources need to know how a drivetrain works? Or the CTO? Or the CFO?

They are experts in their area focus. It's ridiculous to expect every manager to understand everything about their business. Would you expect the CTO of Starbucks to be able to tell you how all of their drinks are made?

I wouldn't. And I wouldn't care if they could.

In general, a good executive doesn't need to know the minutiae. They need to know how to motivate people, how to keep projects on track, how to recognize talent, how to delegate, how to budget, how to distill information for other executives, etc.

Sure, knowing the minutiae usually helps. It's easier to sniff out all the BS people feed you, etc. But it's far from the most important knowledge and skills a great leader needs.

I've only skimmed the article so far, but the part that stuck out to me was this (technical manager talking to the VP): “My people are split on platform,” he continues. “Some want to use Drupal 7 and make it work with Magento—which is still PHP.” He frowns. “The other option is just doing the back end in Node.js with Backbone in front.”

Now, that's an example of a terrible trait for an executive. TMitTB clearly has very little ability to communicate with people outside of his area of expertise. The ability to convey complex ideas simply is crucial. Why would a non-technical executive care about the framework you're using? That's asinine. Worrying about the implementation is TMitTB's job. When meeting with the VP, TMitTB should talk about the business impact of options. This option is cheapest but doesn't give us these features that the marketing department says they must have. This option is best, but it's much more expensive to hire developers with those skills right now.

Re: What Is Code?

#156

Post by roneesh »

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…

I think you're taking their conceit of a VP audience too seriously. To me that just feels like a fun narrative choice, and the article is just intended for any adult dealing with and slightly bewildered by code.

A lot of people find themselves in this role, people who specialize in other fields but still need to interact with developers because software is eating the world, but more quickly it's eating their role.

Re: What Is Code?

#157

Post by igravious »

pjc50 wrote: post #13
igravious wrote: post #5

This is too freaking awesome! Isn't that a seriously mind-bendy kind of article to appear on Bloomberg? Also, isn't it very cool that a whole class of people who may not know a thing about coding (but may be interested) might get to know something about the craft and culture? And it's presented in a very fun, off-kilter sort of way. That must have been a hell of a lot of work. I actually skimmed the second half and t…

could I fashion a bespoke software creation and sell it on Etsy There's tindie (etsy for electronics), but due to the infinitely cloneable nature of code giving it away works much better than trying to sell it for tiny amounts. In someways the demoscene is this area of software craft for the sake of it.

Thanks for the heads-up on Tindie. Looks interesting.

And I agree with you about the Demoscene. Very much one off creations which is more what I had in mind. I'm imagining extending this idea to software objects that people would like to own, that was personalised to them, that had a strong crafting element, and so on. The reason I'm having trouble articulating it is because I don't think the category of thing exists (yet?)

Re: What Is Code?

#158

Post by mc808 »

ForHackernews wrote: post #140
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'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.

A Photoshop "program" would consist of the composition of image layers, adjustment layers, blend modes, styles, masks, text blocks, shapes, paths, and so on. You "run the program" when exporting to a bitmap format.

It probably doesn't help to think about it that way when using Photoshop, but it might be a useful mental model for developing Photoshop, or as an example of how a general visual programming language UI might work. Importantly, Photoshop does not give you a bunch of little boxes with arrows crisscrossing everywhere like all the clumsy and disappointing visual programming experiments I've seen.

Maybe "visual programming" is like "AI". Whenever you make something that actually works, it goes by some other name.

Re: What Is Code?

#159

Post by agentultra »

guscost wrote: post #112
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.

The trouble is that so much of what we call "programming" is actually the process of identifying all the implicit assumptions that go along with an idea and making them explicit. In other words, if you knew what to ask for in an unambiguous way then most of the "programming" would be done already. I'm working on a longer essay but that's the short version.

This is a driving force behind the pedagogy of SICP -- to think in recursive functions. If you can break down your task into sub-problems and describe them clearly you just have to put a few parenthesis around it.

Programming isn't so much about the "code" or syntax; it's semantics and intent aligned with the machine.

If you can express your problem clearly then the program practically writes itself.

Re: What Is Code?

#160

Post by thisjepisje »

benihana wrote: post #142

Ignoring the content, the structure of this article is amazing. It feels like an entire magazine in a single essay. The background animations that change as you scroll, the contextual content (try scrolling really fast). I'm not even all that keen on the bright oversaturated aesthetic, but it's just so cool. I'd love to see a short piece on how they made it.

Have you seen their error pages?

http://www.bloomberg.com/lookathis

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