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What Is Code?

bloomberg.com

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Re: What Is Code?

#171

Post by nightski »

yongelee wrote: post #164
michaelvkpdx wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 edu…

What do you mean? Theres tons, TONS of resources for learning the basics of programming.

So how does that make this article a bad thing?

Also the TONS thing is kind of bad, because it becomes a lot harder for the layperson to filter out the bad resources from the good.

Re: What Is Code?

#172

Post by steveax »

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.

Re: pipelines, you can feed external data into a Photoshop doc [1]

[1]: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/creating-data-driven...

Re: What Is Code?

#173

Post by eropple »

michaelvkpdx wrote: post #125
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…

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 edu…

> Many coders would do well to read a similar article, if there was one, called, "What is Society?"

There was a thread a while back where software developers told me I was unreasonable to expect them to know who the vice president of the country they lived in was. I feel you here a whole bunch.

Re: What Is Code?

#174

Post by mc808 »

ForHackernews wrote: post #165
mc808 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mi…

Maybe. But by that standard, using a Xerox machine is programming because you can layer some pieces of paper and transparencies together and then copy it onto an image on a single sheet. I think to be programming, there has to be some kind "logic" (conditionals, mathematical functions, loops, etc.) embedded in the structure (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom ) and I'm not sure Photoshop qualifies.

I don't think I would consider the arrangement of paper to be a program because it doesn't change the way the machine itself operates (though perhaps one could argue it does at the level of photons and toner molecules--or that a computer just blindly "goes through the motions" with its inputs as much as a copier does with its paper input). But inputting the number of copies, darkness, collation, etc. surely counts as programming in the familiar sense.

Re: What Is Code?

#175

Post by markbnj »

spb wrote: post #150
markbnj wrote: post #30

I've always wanted to attempt this piece: to take all the many layers of abstraction that we deal with, parse them, convert them, and render them through my formidable linguistic talents into one elegant, beautifully constructed piece of prose that magically makes it all comprehensible to lay readers. I haven't yet attempted it, but I give props to Mr. Ford for trying. I'm not surprised he ended up with a novella. Oh…

> I've always wanted to attempt this piece: to take all the many layers of abstraction that we deal with, parse them, convert them, and render them through my formidable linguistic talents into one elegant, beautifully constructed piece of prose that magically makes it all comprehensible to lay readers. This is my own, personal, incomplete work in progress in that vein: http://www.leannotes.com/

I think I like your approach better... and no Clippy.

Re: What Is Code?

#176

Post by greenyoda »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #116
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…

Yet, they do: many VP's in this position are promoted from parts of the company that have nothing to do with tech. I even wonder if this is the majority. Not sure. A huge chunk of VP's out there, though.

It's got to be the majority, since most non-tech companies (i.e., the vast majority of companies in the world) only use tech as a tool - it's not the focus of their business. The executives of banks, retail businesses, airlines, etc. are not likely to have been promoted from the IT Department.

Re: What Is Code?

#177

Post by egocodedinsol »

What an ambitious and beautiful piece!

A story like this is probably dangerous - it touches on so many ideas everyone will find something to gripe with, and it's hard to make a comprehensive and consistent story.

The last time I read something that so awesomely bridged high level abstractions and low-level implementations with a human touch was Godel, Escher, Bach (albeit with a very different feel). Well done.

Re: What Is Code?

#179

Post by tjradcliffe »

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…

> The mere act of calling it programming is somehow a problem.

There are some words that carry with them unshedable connotations that people want to get away from so strongly that they will call themselves something else at the first possible instant. "Programmer" is one of them.

"Poet" is another. No one makes money from poetry because as soon as a poet makes money they are something else: a musician, a performer, a copy-writer, whatever.

Just don't call them a "poet", because "poets" are poor, sad people with no future, just as "programmers" are neckbearded nerdboys who smell bad, and no matter how many programmers (or poets) fail to live up to those stereotypes people will continue to impose them on reality come hell or high water.

Re: What Is Code?

#180

Post by strange_quark »

thisjepisje wrote: post #160
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

Also this one http://www.bloomberg.com/500
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