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It's hard to write code for computers, but it's harder to write code for humans

erikbern.com

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Re: It's hard to write code for computers, but it's harder to write code for humans

#21

Post by remoquete »

EnigmaFlare wrote: post #17
animal531 wrote: post #8

Bit of a side issue for me: I was working on my Unity game the other day and thought to myself, have IDE's really not progressed all that much in the last 10-20 years? Default intellisense has definitely gotten a lot better, but apart from that and a few other minor things the whole concept of coding feels pretty much the same today as back then. The biggest positive change for me is outside of the editor, it has bec…

Visual Basic in VS has aggressive autocomplete and it gets pretty annoying. You often want to write things in a different order and end up having to delete the auto-inserted endif/quotes/brackets/variable names (if it's not yet declared, it changes it to become something else that is), etc.

Oh, you still code in Visual Basic? Fascinating. May I ask what's the use case and how are you finding coding in VB these days?

Re: It's hard to write code for computers, but it's harder to write code for humans

#22

Post by 1718627440 »

animal531 wrote: post #8

Bit of a side issue for me: I was working on my Unity game the other day and thought to myself, have IDE's really not progressed all that much in the last 10-20 years? Default intellisense has definitely gotten a lot better, but apart from that and a few other minor things the whole concept of coding feels pretty much the same today as back then. The biggest positive change for me is outside of the editor, it has bec…

> You're editing a file (or parts of different files) and are focusing on say 5 methods that are interacting. I want to see all of them on the screen at the same time, without having to struggle to open and manage many windows with for example VS horizontal/vertical sliders.

I think that is, why editors like emacs and vi are really popular.

- Data conversion. So I created a HashSet for something but realize I need to change it to a Dictionary or a Tuple, just make it happen. If it requires brainwork then show me all the places that requires supervision where I have to say ok or make an edit myself.

How different would that be from changing the type and editing all the places the compiler complains about?

Re: It's hard to write code for computers, but it's harder to write code for humans

#23

Post by binary132 »

animal531 wrote: post #8

Bit of a side issue for me: I was working on my Unity game the other day and thought to myself, have IDE's really not progressed all that much in the last 10-20 years? Default intellisense has definitely gotten a lot better, but apart from that and a few other minor things the whole concept of coding feels pretty much the same today as back then. The biggest positive change for me is outside of the editor, it has bec…

Actually it has gotten worse because our software abstractions have become a lot more complex.

Re: It's hard to write code for computers, but it's harder to write code for humans

#24

Post by bombela »

animal531 wrote: post #8

Bit of a side issue for me: I was working on my Unity game the other day and thought to myself, have IDE's really not progressed all that much in the last 10-20 years? Default intellisense has definitely gotten a lot better, but apart from that and a few other minor things the whole concept of coding feels pretty much the same today as back then. The biggest positive change for me is outside of the editor, it has bec…

Some of what you described, having 5 methods on screen, or finding all locations failing type checking, I have been using (neo)vim for successful over many years.

I load the output of the type checker (or compiler) into vim. I then have a list of locations to inspect. I can move between the locations. I can open multiple locations (same file or not) at once on the screen. Nowadays, Copilot assists in the refactoring besides the usual vim commands/regex/macro.

Opening 5 pane for 5 methods is similarly easy. I can also use a side panel to quickly view all methods and jump between them in addition to the traditional vim motions.

Language servers (LSP) of course makes the whole experience delightful. Jumping and navigating around the code etc.

All of that is keyboard driven, with many keyboard shortcuts personalized to my liking.

Here is an example of my workflow. I run the compile/typecheck command in a terminal, via a script that runs the command as soon as a source file has changed. It also saves the output into a file at a standard location. Saving in vim triggers the command to re-run. Then a key press reloads the output of the command to quickly jump around.

And navigating and modifying brackets is trivial in vim, especially with the right extension. Auto inserting brackets, I never found a plugin that I liked enough yet.

It's not all nor exactly what you asked for. But it's something.

Re: It's hard to write code for computers, but it's harder to write code for humans

#25

Post by bippihippi1 »

animal531 wrote: post #8

Bit of a side issue for me: I was working on my Unity game the other day and thought to myself, have IDE's really not progressed all that much in the last 10-20 years? Default intellisense has definitely gotten a lot better, but apart from that and a few other minor things the whole concept of coding feels pretty much the same today as back then. The biggest positive change for me is outside of the editor, it has bec…

I think the reason the text editor experience hasn't improved that much is because it's not often a bottleneck.

Thinking and learning are the hardest parts of programming. Typing faster doesn't help that much.

Re: It's hard to write code for computers, but it's harder to write code for humans

#27

Post by ants_everywhere »

animal531 wrote: post #8

Bit of a side issue for me: I was working on my Unity game the other day and thought to myself, have IDE's really not progressed all that much in the last 10-20 years? Default intellisense has definitely gotten a lot better, but apart from that and a few other minor things the whole concept of coding feels pretty much the same today as back then. The biggest positive change for me is outside of the editor, it has bec…

I may not be understanding you correctly, so please let me know if I've gotten it wrong.

Some of the stuff you're talking about -- like brackets and terminators -- make explicit the syntax and greatly improve tooling. Usually editors have features that can add these in or you. But in some cases something is obvious to you, but is really one valid choice among many and the tooling can't read your mind without something like a design doc to guide its decisions.

For others -- like whether to use a HashSet or Dictionary or Tuple -- those have performance implications and it's not always clear in the abstract when to use one or the other. But for explicit languages like Java (and I would assume C#) you should be able to refactor a method call to take a different type. Then you just have to change one method and refactor all the calls to it.

I've been experimenting with the pro Gemini and ChatGPT o1. They're both really bad at coding Python and JavaScript. They write buggy code and will often introduce bugs when attempting to fix another. Both feel like they're rushing to answer instead of thinking about the requirements. I'd say we're still a bit away from having tools that can "read your mind" or understand what matters to you and what doesn't the way you'd (or we'd) like them to.

Potentially even worse: consider the data we're training on. These tools will be adopting the thought patterns of the average coder since most code is produced by average and below average coders. Even if we trained the tools only on the highest quality code, it's not clear that most coders would know how to prompt it correctly. So I think if you've been coding for 10-20 years chances are decent that you'll always be a little disappointed with the tooling if you're expecting instant wizardry.

That said, non-AI static analysis tools have been great for a while and will get even better. Adding AI to them will improve them further. So I think you can have a great experience if you're thinking of the tools as helping you be an artist rather than as an artist you can give a spec to and get back a decent result.

EDIT: It might be fun to experiment with telling the AI what you want your editor to do more of and asking the AI to help you configure it. There's a lot of non-AI tooling in plugins. Getting an LLM to help you pick the right plugins for your lifestyle may be the best bang for your buck.

Re: It's hard to write code for computers, but it's harder to write code for humans

#28

Post by thoronton »

animal531 wrote: post #8

Bit of a side issue for me: I was working on my Unity game the other day and thought to myself, have IDE's really not progressed all that much in the last 10-20 years? Default intellisense has definitely gotten a lot better, but apart from that and a few other minor things the whole concept of coding feels pretty much the same today as back then. The biggest positive change for me is outside of the editor, it has bec…

> You're editing a file (or parts of different files) and are focusing on say 5 methods that are interacting. I want to see all of them on the screen at the same time, without having to struggle to open and manage many windows with for example VS horizontal/vertical sliders

Regarding this, maybe haystack could be interesting for you

https://haystackeditor.com/

I haven't tried it myself, but I intend to.

Re: It's hard to write code for computers, but it's harder to write code for humans

#29

Post by konschubert »

animal531 wrote: post #8

Bit of a side issue for me: I was working on my Unity game the other day and thought to myself, have IDE's really not progressed all that much in the last 10-20 years? Default intellisense has definitely gotten a lot better, but apart from that and a few other minor things the whole concept of coding feels pretty much the same today as back then. The biggest positive change for me is outside of the editor, it has bec…

Have you tried github copilot?

It's not doing multi-file editing yet, but once it does, I think it's pretty much what you are looking for.

Re: It's hard to write code for computers, but it's harder to write code for humans

#30

Post by auggierose »

kalaksi wrote: post #13
auggierose wrote: post #4

A nice read, but I think there is a contradiction here that needs to be cleared up: 1) On one hand, the author says that humans learn from examples, not core concepts. 2) On the other hand, the author emphasises the importance of reducing "conceptual overload", by reducing the number of concepts while maintaining their expressiveness. So it is not that core concepts are not important for learning. Rather, it is essen…

I didn't find it contradictory. The first one is about how to start learning about something more easily and the second one about how to organize it all so that it's easier to use and understand as a whole. That may also help with getting started too. I personally agree that examples are a very efficient way to get started and you can learn the details incrementally in a top-down fashion. Some text books during my st…

There is even a headline saying "Getting started is the product".

No, it is not. If your product doesn't have nice core concepts, then I don't even want to get started with it.

Top-down is fine, as long as there is an actual bottom of core concepts.

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