I think of it as a beautiful, colourful, crystalline structure.
What Is Code?
161–170 of 368 posts
Re: What Is Code?
#162It'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…
> 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?
Grade school teachers aren't expected to be specialists in the field they teach. They're expected to be specialists in teaching. Usually they have a bachelors (or masters) in education and maybe another degree, but it may or may not be the thing they teach (if they even teach only one thing at all).
To put it another way, this is a bit like asking what physicists would willingly teach in the USA's education system? The answer is obviously not very many, but that's beside the point. Physics still gets taught.
Re: What Is Code?
#163Re: What Is Code?
#164It'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…
What do you mean? Theres tons, TONS of resources for learning the basics of programming.
Re: What Is Code?
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 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.
Re: What Is Code?
#166> Smalltalk’s history is often described as slightly tragic, because many of its best ideas never permeated the culture of code. But it’s still around, still has users, and anyone can use Squeak or Pharo. Also—
>
> 1. Java is an object-oriented language, influenced by C++, that runs on a virtual machine (just like Smalltalk).
> 2. Objective-C, per its name, jammed C and Smalltalk together with no apologies.
> 3. C# (pronounced “C sharp”) is based on C and influenced by Java, but it was created by Microsoft for use in its .NET framework.
> 4. C++ is an object-oriented version of C, although its roots are more in Simula.
>
> The number of digital things conceived in 1972 that are still under regular discussion is quite small. (It was the year of The Godfather and Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together.) The world corrupts the pure vision of great ideas. I pronounce Smalltalk a raging, wild, global success.
Except that these examples are "object-oriented" in almost none of the ways Smalltalk was object-oriented: http://www.paulgraham.com/reesoo.html
The specious reasoning on display in this paragraph is almost offensive in its glib uncomprehension. Calling Smalltalk "a raging, wild, global success" because modern programming languages call themselves "object-oriented" is like saying women in technology are well-represented because Ada Lovelace was the first programmer.
I get that it's supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, but like the rest of the writing in this article, it's supposed to be tongue-in-cheek in a way that gestures toward what the author actually thinks. In this case, what it's gesturing at is the notion that Smalltalk has had a large-scale tangible influence (if not wholesale adoption) on modern programming languages, which, if you actually take the time to understand the subject, is just not true.
Re: What Is Code?
#167Earlier 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…
Using Photoshop is instructing a computer to perform a series of operations, necessarily fairly high level ones, but conceptually not that different from text-based coding. I agree it stretches the definition pretty thin: where's the control flow? Conditionals?, but are those things really foundational characteristics of programming languages or are they simply the equivalent 'predefined tools' that, say, C gives us?
Excel is much closer to traditional programming: it's basically a purely functional language (absent VBA), but instead of a linear description of the program in a text file, you're in effect embedding functional code inside a virtual machine's memory.
EDIT: I suppose an important question about Photoshop is, can you do computation in it?
Re: What Is Code?
#168> 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…
Yep, great examples. Also, pretty much any experienced Photoshop user will create their own actions to automate common operations. And then you have things like workflows in Alfred.
Re: What Is Code?
#169It'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…
"When meeting with the VP, TMitTB should talk about the business impact of options."
I don't think he even knows what the business impacts are. TMitTB is just a tech guy who works for the new CTO. Presumably, the CTO (being an executive in charge of technology) can speak both the language of tech and the language of business and could make a business case to the VP, in terms he understands, as to why the company needs the new software. The CTO should not have sent her tech guy to talk to the VP.
Re: What Is Code?
#170"If you’re old enough to remember DOS, you know what a command line is."
This is a joke right?