I think the author should read Fred Brooks's "No Silver Bullet". Many of his arguments are still valid after 28 years. "There is no single development, in either technology or in management technique, that by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity."
Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
21–30 of 97 posts
Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
#22I don't think we have to worry about "everyone" or even a small percentage thereof learning how to code. They won't. It's not that they can't, but it takes more than a couple of hours writing "Hello World" to do anything substantial and most people are not willing to put in the time, day after day, to learn anything substantial. That being said, I can't imagine anything more human and more powerful than text. If I wa…
"It's not that they can't"
No, they really can't. Garbage in garbage out. Can't implement an algorithm or follow a protocol unless you understand it, and the world is full of people who literally don't understand how a thermostat works, how to drive safely, or how to implement the NRAs three basic rules of gun safety.
Note that our shared enjoyment of text as per your 3rd paragraph is only politically correct WRT to programming... if you dare to suggest text might also be the superior user interface, the dogpile will begin. Which is sad. Closed minds are always weaker than open minds...
Lets play a game, I'm thinking of a well designed, expressive, long lived programming language developed by a linguist... Its dumped on here at HN for no logical reason, just the usual womens fashion fad explanations. I suspect this would happen to any "English like" future programming language.
Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
#23There is a reason we speak and write words to communicate complex ideas rather than hold up pictures. Words are powerful and flexible. They are not going away.
Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
#24Hold on a second. OOP, markup, APIs, and HTML/CSS/JS are snake oil, while visual programming isn't? Say what you will about the former technologies, but they're being used for productive purposes. Visual programming is vaporware that someone tries to build every 5 years or so to no effect. Functional programming has much the same challenge, but it's getting integrated into mainstream languages. Otherwise, it would li…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LabVIEW I believe that's an example of visual/graphical programming, it's fairly mainstream in some areas and not vaporware. Re: Rest of comment - Filtered site, I'll read it at home.
There's a bit of a stereotype about labview that it is graphically beautiful but its not visual programming because it inevitably results in more typing of text than anything else, otherwise you get a bowl of spaghetti. With textual languages you can interpret it to figure it out, perhaps a billion times slower than the computer, but exactly the same. Visual is a little harder to figure out.
Or in summary I've seen large complicated Labview that's totally write once read never.
You might be interested in screenshots from GNURadio. Same effect. Spaghetti bowl of a schematic where a plain text version would be a lot clearer. Google for a simple WBFM radio with squelch and AFC aka your $5 walkman broadcast radio, and you get something that looks like its launching the space shuttle.
Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LabVIEW I believe that's an example of visual/graphical programming, it's fairly mainstream in some areas and not vaporware. Re: Rest of comment - Filtered site, I'll read it at home.
There's a bit of a stereotype about labview that it is graphically beautiful but its not visual programming because it inevitably results in more typing of text than anything else, otherwise you get a bowl of spaghetti. With textual languages you can interpret it to figure it out, perhaps a billion times slower than the computer, but exactly the same. Visual is a little harder to figure out. Or in summary I've seen l…
I never personally used LabView (well, maybe in a Physics 101 lab in college, but that was a while back). The people using it in the offices I've worked in have generally been electrical engineers, perhaps the schematic view meshes better with their mental model of computation. It seemed to work well on most of the projects.
EDIT: I should add, when I did look at the LabView stuffs, it seemed to make sense to me (as a reader), but I'm not sure how easy or difficult it would have been for me to jump into and start working on after someone else has constructed a lot of parts.
Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
#26Hold on a second. OOP, markup, APIs, and HTML/CSS/JS are snake oil, while visual programming isn't? Say what you will about the former technologies, but they're being used for productive purposes. Visual programming is vaporware that someone tries to build every 5 years or so to no effect. Functional programming has much the same challenge, but it's getting integrated into mainstream languages. Otherwise, it would li…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LabVIEW I believe that's an example of visual/graphical programming, it's fairly mainstream in some areas and not vaporware. Re: Rest of comment - Filtered site, I'll read it at home.
having used labview I'd say that if that is the pinnacle of visual programming, then it has quite a bit of improvement needed.
Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
#27Hold on a second. OOP, markup, APIs, and HTML/CSS/JS are snake oil, while visual programming isn't? Say what you will about the former technologies, but they're being used for productive purposes. Visual programming is vaporware that someone tries to build every 5 years or so to no effect. Functional programming has much the same challenge, but it's getting integrated into mainstream languages. Otherwise, it would li…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LabVIEW I believe that's an example of visual/graphical programming, it's fairly mainstream in some areas and not vaporware. Re: Rest of comment - Filtered site, I'll read it at home.
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Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
#28> "Programming is a notion to extend human capability, by offloading humanly-infeasible work onto a machine. It is the promise of an amplified knowledge worker. This would be worthy to learn." With this (correct) notion the author continues until he decides that > "Meanwhile there are few souls looking to evolve text code into something more humanly intuitive. For example something you can touch, you don’t have to re…
> Why is it acceptable to say that effective communication with people depends on being able to think like the person you're talking to, but demand that communication with a far more different and limited machine should never require you to compromise on your preferred thought patterns?
Other people are sentient beings with their own personalities, dreams, desires, and attitudes. Recognition of our shared humanity necessitates some level of compromise, respect, and accommodation when dealing with other individuals.
In contrast, computers are unfeeling machines. We made them, and within the limits of physics, math, and our own creative powers, we can make them do whatever we wish. Why shouldn't we strive to make them as accommodating as possible? Why shouldn't I try to create a machine that intuitively corrects my mechanical errors to represent the shape of my ideas?
Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
#29Probably the biggest bit:
"Can’t I just make a website?"
That type of question is where a lot of things go wrong. Newbies ask that because they don't have the experience to break it into smaller parts, experienced people get tripped up because they can't see past the "well, what type of website doing what?"--all the while the question is "what would you use it for?".
It's a bad question, because the asker doesn't know enough to ask a useful one. Our job, then, is to help them learn how to ask the right question.
Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
#30> "Programming is a notion to extend human capability, by offloading humanly-infeasible work onto a machine. It is the promise of an amplified knowledge worker. This would be worthy to learn." With this (correct) notion the author continues until he decides that > "Meanwhile there are few souls looking to evolve text code into something more humanly intuitive. For example something you can touch, you don’t have to re…
Moreover, I'd just jump in here to point out that effective communication with people quite frequently involves "text code".