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They lied to you. Building software is hard

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Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#31

Post by jefftk »

dijit wrote: post #22
citelao wrote: post #15

Perhaps this is a bit OT, since the article focuses more on self-development ("When training a muscle, you only get stronger with resistance"), but I wonder about the subtitle: > Every week there seems to be a new tool that promises to let anyone build applications 10x faster. The promise is always the same and so is the outcome. Is the second sentence true? Regardless of AI, I think that programming (game developmen…

I'm not sure. Think of the Game hits from the 90's. A room full of people made games which shaped a generation. Maybe it was orders of magnitude harder then, but today, it's multiple orders of magnitude more people required to make them. Same is true for websites. Sure, the websites were dingy with poor UX and oodles of bugs... but the size of the team required to make them was absolutely tiny compared to today. Thin…

> Think of the Game hits from the 90's. A room full of people made games which shaped a generation. Maybe it was orders of magnitude harder then, but today, it's multiple orders of magnitude more people required to make them.

I think this is more about rising consumer expectations than rising implementation difficulty.

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#32

Post by kerblang »

citelao wrote: post #15

Perhaps this is a bit OT, since the article focuses more on self-development ("When training a muscle, you only get stronger with resistance"), but I wonder about the subtitle: > Every week there seems to be a new tool that promises to let anyone build applications 10x faster. The promise is always the same and so is the outcome. Is the second sentence true? Regardless of AI, I think that programming (game developmen…

Short answer: No, things have not gotten easier. The toolchain is insanely huge. A computer science graduate is woefully underprepared for the tool tsnuami that will completely swamp their careers. Many of these tools are worse than no tool at all.

Causes: Bubble economics, perverse incentives, lack of objectivity, and more.

The good news is that huge competitive advantages are available to those who refuse to accept norms without careful evaluation.

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#33

Post by cess11 »

citelao wrote: post #15

Perhaps this is a bit OT, since the article focuses more on self-development ("When training a muscle, you only get stronger with resistance"), but I wonder about the subtitle: > Every week there seems to be a new tool that promises to let anyone build applications 10x faster. The promise is always the same and so is the outcome. Is the second sentence true? Regardless of AI, I think that programming (game developmen…

I think it is about as hard as it ever was. The tricky part is learning to think through problems in a certain way, when you have that it doesn't matter much whether you're reading hexdumps and slinging low-level code on a 68k chip or clicking about in Godot and watching videos about clicking.

Crapping out code that does the thing was never the hard part, the hard part is reading the crap someone did and changing it. There are tradeoffs here, perhaps you might invest in modeling up front and use more or less formal methods, or you're just great at executing code over and over very fast with small adjustments and interpreting the result. Either way you'll eventually produce something robust that someone else can change reasonably fast when needed.

The additions to Java and C# are a lot about functional programming concepts, and we've had those since forever way back in the sixties. Map/reduce/filter are old concepts, and every loop is just recursion with some degree of veiling, it's not a big thing whether you piece it together in assembly or Scheme, typing it out isn't where you'll spend most of your time. That'll be reading it once it's no longer yesterday that you wrote it.

If I were to invent a 10x-meganinja-dev-superpower-tool it would be focused on static and execution analysis, with strong extendability in a simple DSL or programming language, and decent visualisation API:s. It would not be 'type here to spin the wheels and see what code drops out', that part is solved many times over already, in Wordpress, JAXB oriented CRM and so on. The ability to confidently implement change in a large, complex system is enabled by deterministic immediate analysis and visualisation.

Then there are the soft skills. While you're doing it you need to keep bosses and "stakeholders" happy and make sure they do not start worrying about the things you do. So you need to communicate reliably and clearly, in a language they understand, which is commonly pictures with simple words they use a lot every day and little arrows that bring the message together. Whether you use this or that mainstream programming language will not matter at all in this.

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#34

Post by tom2948329494 »

> The problem is that while these tools can help you build a simple prototype incredibly quickly, when it comes to building functional applications they are much more limited

As someone with 0 (zero) swift skills and who has built a very well functioning iOS app purely with AI, I disagree.

AI made me infinitly faster because without it I wouldn‘t even have tried to build it.

And yes, I know the limits and security concerns and understand enough to be effective with AI.

You can build functioning applications just fine.

It‘s complexity and novel problems where AI _might_ struggle, but not every software is complex or novel.

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#35

Post by anonymous344 »

true. I've built a simple app that solved the annoying problem usually in that app-space of giving/typing time and date. after years and years, people still pay for it, which im very grateful. i even saw many M$ companies build their products yet lacked the simple mind to ease the user ecperience with non-default date and time selector..

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#37

Post by anonymous344 »

tom2948329494 wrote: post #34

> The problem is that while these tools can help you build a simple prototype incredibly quickly, when it comes to building functional applications they are much more limited As someone with 0 (zero) swift skills and who has built a very well functioning iOS app purely with AI, I disagree. AI made me infinitly faster because without it I wouldn‘t even have tried to build it. And yes, I know the limits and security co…

do you make money with it? like monthly subscription? because that's my achilles heel, how to synch the mysql backend with apple's payment system so it knows when user ordered or cancelled

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#38

Post by ForHackernews »

jefftk wrote: post #31
dijit wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure. Think of the Game hits from the 90's. A room full of people made games which shaped a generation. Maybe it was orders of magnitude harder then, but today, it's multiple orders of magnitude more people required to make them. Same is true for websites. Sure, the websites were dingy with poor UX and oodles of bugs... but the size of the team required to make them was absolutely tiny compared to today. Thin…

> Think of the Game hits from the 90's. A room full of people made games which shaped a generation. Maybe it was orders of magnitude harder then, but today, it's multiple orders of magnitude more people required to make them. I think this is more about rising consumer expectations than rising implementation difficulty.

Aren't those the same thing? If your consumers demand more, that's more difficult to implement.

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#39

Post by tom2948329494 »

anonymous344 wrote: post #37
tom2948329494 wrote: post #34

> The problem is that while these tools can help you build a simple prototype incredibly quickly, when it comes to building functional applications they are much more limited As someone with 0 (zero) swift skills and who has built a very well functioning iOS app purely with AI, I disagree. AI made me infinitly faster because without it I wouldn‘t even have tried to build it. And yes, I know the limits and security co…

do you make money with it? like monthly subscription? because that's my achilles heel, how to synch the mysql backend with apple's payment system so it knows when user ordered or cancelled

Yes, using apples own storekit for in-app purchases.

Re: They lied to you. Building software is hard

#40

Post by anonymous344 »

dijit wrote: post #22
citelao wrote: post #15

Perhaps this is a bit OT, since the article focuses more on self-development ("When training a muscle, you only get stronger with resistance"), but I wonder about the subtitle: > Every week there seems to be a new tool that promises to let anyone build applications 10x faster. The promise is always the same and so is the outcome. Is the second sentence true? Regardless of AI, I think that programming (game developmen…

I'm not sure. Think of the Game hits from the 90's. A room full of people made games which shaped a generation. Maybe it was orders of magnitude harder then, but today, it's multiple orders of magnitude more people required to make them. Same is true for websites. Sure, the websites were dingy with poor UX and oodles of bugs... but the size of the team required to make them was absolutely tiny compared to today. Thin…

it's not the making part, it's the making a competitive end-result. in 2000 only needed to make something and it was good enough. now you need marketing budget of 10 000$ and skills for that also
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