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What Is Code?

bloomberg.com

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Re: What Is Code?

#331

Post by zeckalpha »

meric wrote: post #326
lucozade wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many years ago I managed to convince my management that, if they had to use deltaLOC as a performance metric, that they at least use abs(deltaLoC). I then spent the next year cutting huge chunks of crap out of a C++ application that I had inherited. Was a most satisfying experience.

Hmm, shouldn't it be Sum(abs(deltaLoC per change))? Otherwise if you added 50 lines a day and removed 50, your abs(deltaLoC) will be 0.

Let's add some whitespace to the README. Let's remove some whitespace from the README. Let's add some whitespace to the README.

Re: What Is Code?

#332

Post by dragonwriter »

thrwwy5 wrote: post #302
dragonwriter wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AMA and ABA aren't labor unions; outside of government service -- where programmers are also often unionized, too -- doctors and lawyers generally don't have labor unions.

How exactly are they not unions? They lobby for legislation to erect barriers to entry to reduce competition and secure higher wages for their members. The ABA was actually the target of an anti-trust investigation by the Justice Department that resulted in them pleading guilty and paying a fine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Bar_Association#Antitr... The AMA (and AAMC, and the licensing boards) should be dea…

Lobbying for legislation is a tangential part of what a labor union does, and lots of organizations that aren't labor unions also do that. Labor unions first and foremost do collective bargaining on behalf of employees with the business owners who employ them. ABA and AMA don't do that.

ABA and AMA are professional associations, like ACM, that happen to have effective lobbying arms, and their members are often independent business owners rather than employees.

Re: What Is Code?

#333

Post by empthought »

thrwwy5 wrote: post #302
dragonwriter wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AMA and ABA aren't labor unions; outside of government service -- where programmers are also often unionized, too -- doctors and lawyers generally don't have labor unions.

How exactly are they not unions? They lobby for legislation to erect barriers to entry to reduce competition and secure higher wages for their members. The ABA was actually the target of an anti-trust investigation by the Justice Department that resulted in them pleading guilty and paying a fine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Bar_Association#Antitr... The AMA (and AAMC, and the licensing boards) should be dea…

You must not know many doctors.

Re: What Is Code?

#334

Post by rdrey »

ZoZoBee wrote: post #273
recursive wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you consider to be a photo for your certificate of achievement to be good?

Are you naive enough to not believe the photo will be saved along with a host of other metaData to bloomberg's server?

Well, you could read the source of course, to see whether the photo data is sent to the server or whether the cert is generated client-side. And then there is this: https://github.com/bloombergmedia/whatiscode/

Re: What Is Code?

#335

Post by Willson50 »

tormeh wrote: post #320
ErikRogneby wrote: post #86

"That’s how change enters into this world. Slowly at first, then on the front page of Hacker News." How meta.

I didn't really understand that part. Care to explain?

Aggregate sites like Hacker News and Reddit make distribution of news and ideas very quick and viral compared to more organic growth such as word of mouth and google.

Re: What Is Code?

#336

Post by clebio »

fit2rule wrote: post #323
clebio wrote: post #264

> Writing this article was a nightmare because I know that no matter how many people review it, I’ll have missed something, some thread that a reader can pull and say, “He missed the essence of the subject.” I know you’re out there, ashamed to have me as an advocate. I accept that. I know that what I describe as “compilation” is but a tiny strand of that subject; I know that the ways I characterize programming langua…

Keep writing. The space is there for you.

Just to clarify, my earlier comment is a direct quote from the article. I am not the author, just thought it was an apt anticipation of some of criticisms in this thread.

Re: What Is Code?

#337

Post by keithpeter »

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…

"It's 2015. The audience of this article shouldn't even exist."

Well, the audience most certainly does exist whether it should or not. The thing to think about is what to do about that.

Re: What Is Code?

#338

Post by pitay »

jveld wrote: post #328
ForHackernews wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To me, the defining feature is automation. A "programmable" system is one where smaller actions can be composed into larger ones and saved for invocation later (by name, in response to some event, etc). I don't know much about photoshop, but judging from what people have said, it seems to meet this definition. I will concede that "programming," in the sense of "I've been programming for the last couple hours" or "He…

I have read elsewhere that programming is giving the computer instructions. So clicking the close button on a window or typing into a word processor is technically programming (although it is not coding). My search-fu was unable to find that though.

Re: What Is Code?

#339

Post by parasubvert »

tempestn wrote: post #314
maratd wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It is absolutely unreasonable. The average person has no clue who the vice president happens to be ... so why should software developers? We can complain about how clueless average people are, sure, but there's no reason to apply a higher standard to so…

Wait, what? The average person doesn't know who the vice president of their own country is? I'm Canadian and I still know who the US vice president is. Surely most American adults do too.

Nope: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1368482/How-ignorant...

Lots of people hate politics and really avoid any study of it.

Re: What Is Code?

#340

Post by eli »

ianphughes wrote: post #73
booleanbetrayal wrote: post #70

> “No,” I said. “First of all, I’m not good at the math. I’m a programmer, yes, but I’m an East Coast programmer, not one of these serious platform people from the Bay Area.” seriously?

That jumped out at me too. It colored the remainder of my reading experience.

It's a joke.
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