One of my all-time favorite talks. The IT industry is pretty bad in general at knowing what problems have previously been solved.
> what problems have previously been solved
And we're worse at identifying what the problems actually are.
The Future of Programming (2013)
21–30 of 67 posts
Re: The Future of Programming (2013)
#22One of my all-time favorite talks. The IT industry is pretty bad in general at knowing what problems have previously been solved.
This was one of my professors favorite gripes. He loved to tell stories about how companies would reinvent algorithms (usually multiple times) that had been published in the 70's and 80's
The problem here is search. The problem may have been solved, but finding the relevant paper is like looking for a needle in the haystack. It doesn't help that terminology has changed during the years...
Re: The Future of Programming (2013)
#23Is anyone working on these problems, or did people just give up? It's crazy to think that the way we create and consume software barely changed since the 60s/70s.
Yeah it's definitely crazy! A few people are working on this from different angles. There is research https://harc.ycr.org/project/realtalk/ , side projects that explore Jupyter notebook like programming environments: https://www.maria.cloud/intro , or https://www.runkit.com ; my team and I are working on https://www.clay.run : making it easier to prototype by allowing developers to write code that is instantly runni…
Maria, clay and runkit look interesting - I like the quick iterations and incremental programming they allow.
But you're still writing 'text' to manipulate 'data'. An example of something fundamentally different would be if you can make programs without text. I intentionally said make not write to avoid framing the discussion. For instance why write `(circle 10)` when you can instead just draw a circle and then perhaps define processes to manipulate it? I don't mean code generation - why even have text as the canonical form that describes computation processes?
Re: The Future of Programming (2013)
#24I think this attitude of "we solved these problems decades ago!" is rather naive and sometimes arrogant.
I think it's a fantastic talk, and that Bret Victor and Alan Kay are geniuses. But I feel that they both promote the idea that we definitively solved all these important computing problems years ago, and that people are just too clueless/resistant to catch on. Yes, I agree that many good ideas have been culturally "forgotten". But for the most part, the reason these great past ideas are not in use is because nobody has made them into a compelling product.
Their attitude is comparable to someone saying "oh I invented the WWW in 1985 but nobody would listen to me", or "oh I invented Twitter before Twitter but users weren't enlightened enough to appreciate it". Almost all good ideas were already had before, but they are worth comparatively little, and unlikely to catch on, until they are reified into something that people want to use.
I agree with them that probably more people should be working in certain areas (e.g. new ways of programming). But if they really had it all figured out, then why haven't they themselves made the amazing new programming language that we all use? What if it's the case that some of their ideas are good in theory, but are hard to translate into a usable product? Most people accept that execution>>idea in the world of startups, but don't acknowledge that the same may apply here.
Re: The Future of Programming (2013)
#25Is anyone working on these problems, or did people just give up? It's crazy to think that the way we create and consume software barely changed since the 60s/70s.
You're right, it is crazy. A few people, here and there, are trying -- but precious few.
There's a regular meetup group in San Francisco:
Re: The Future of Programming (2013)
#26I think this attitude of "we solved these problems decades ago!" is rather naive and sometimes arrogant. I think it's a fantastic talk, and that Bret Victor and Alan Kay are geniuses. But I feel that they both promote the idea that we definitively solved all these important computing problems years ago, and that people are just too clueless/resistant to catch on. Yes, I agree that many good ideas have been culturally…
> comparable to someone saying "oh I invented the WWW in 1985 but nobody would listen to me"
I hear there's a guy that invented EMAIL..
Re: The Future of Programming (2013)
#27Is anyone working on these problems, or did people just give up? It's crazy to think that the way we create and consume software barely changed since the 60s/70s.
Commercialization and commoditization: "Why make things better when people don't care?"
Oh, people do care. Programmers are expensive, and making them more productive means more money for the bottom line.
It’s just that we don’t know how. Even designing a good text based language is very challenging, and in no way a solved problem. Something graphical and interactive has a much larger design surface, and is thus even harder to get right, especially for general purpose programming.
Re: The Future of Programming (2013)
#28Is anyone working on these problems, or did people just give up? It's crazy to think that the way we create and consume software barely changed since the 60s/70s.
Max/MSP has implemented some of the visual programming ideas he refers to in the talk https://cycling74.com/products/max
It is domain-specific and their current promotional material makes it look like an expanded DAW a la Ableton Live, but you can develop all kinds of software in Max, not that you necessarily should.
Re: The Future of Programming (2013)
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah it's definitely crazy! A few people are working on this from different angles. There is research https://harc.ycr.org/project/realtalk/ , side projects that explore Jupyter notebook like programming environments: https://www.maria.cloud/intro , or https://www.runkit.com ; my team and I are working on https://www.clay.run : making it easier to prototype by allowing developers to write code that is instantly runni…
Maria, clay and runkit look interesting - I like the quick iterations and incremental programming they allow. But you're still writing 'text' to manipulate 'data'. An example of something fundamentally different would be if you can make programs without text. I intentionally said make not write to avoid framing the discussion. For instance why write `(circle 10)` when you can instead just draw a circle and then perha…
yes absolutely! I think things along the idea of programming by example like Flash Fill https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/flash-fill-fl... or direct manipulation of graphics or other objects would be very interesting. I think in order to move away from text it would be important to find use-cases where other forms of describing computational processes would give the person an order of magnitude more leverage over doing the same thing in text. The idea of programming by example would make it so that testing skills are more valuable than breaking down a process into logical steps.
Re: The Future of Programming (2013)
#30Some of the "better programming" stuff exists, programmers just don't program them because you don't need them for it.
Parallel programming didn't matter as much as long as clockrates continued to scale with transistor count. The disconnect is a relatively recent phenomena (last 10 years). There's also lots of tools beyond raw threads+locks these days.