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What Is Code?

bloomberg.com

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Re: What Is Code?

#311

Post by anigbrowl »

JetSpiegel wrote: post #252
anigbrowl wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but a lot of them go through the same hoops - Hello World, variables, conditionals, loops, arrays, functions, OK that's it take this pile of building materials and just turn it into a house mmkay. There are two big problems for would-be programmers: there's a shortage of obvious standards on architecture/program sturcture (not least because it's hard to prove mathematically which structures are optimal), and end…

That page on DOM is the reference Manual. Do you complain that Gray's Anatomy is just too thick, how do you navigate all that info to find what pill should you take?

We're talking about how it presents to novice programmers.

Re: What Is Code?

#312

Post by Kaizyn »

arxpoetica wrote: post #49

> 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.

The wrong people are working on this problem. The only ones who think about it are typically programmers who have made their peace with the machines as they are today. The interface of code seems simple and logical with little reason to try to improve on it. It would take a team of artists, musicians, human factors engineers, ethnographers and some clever computer scientists to do it. Such an enterprise would be high risk and very difficult to fund because of it.

Re: What Is Code?

#313

Post by tempestn »

Was the bit about PHP standing for Personal Home Page a joke? I always thought it was "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor". The coolest thing about PHP is the infinite recursion in its name!

Re: What Is Code?

#314

Post by tempestn »

maratd wrote: post #214
eropple wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many coders would do well to read a similar article, if there was one, called, "What is Society?" There was a thread a while back where software developers told me I was unreasonable to expect them to know who the vice president of the country they lived in was. I feel you here a whole bunch.

> There was a thread a while back where software developers told me I was unreasonable to expect them to know who the vice president of the country they lived in was. It is absolutely unreasonable. The average person has no clue who the vice president happens to be ... so why should software developers? We can complain about how clueless average people are, sure, but there's no reason to apply a higher standard to so…

Wait, what? The average person doesn't know who the vice president of their own country is? I'm Canadian and I still know who the US vice president is. Surely most American adults do too.

Re: What Is Code?

#315

Post by tommorris »

merrickread wrote: post #9

My Dad always tells me he flat out does not understand what I do. He respects it, knows it's challenging and fun, but just doesn't get it. I've sent this to him -- he's about 1/4 of the way through and thoroughly enjoying it. This is a very fun read that's worth leafing through

Same. I sent this to my boyfriend yesterday: he's trying to learn programming (I'm trying to teach him Python; in response, I'm trying to learn some foreign languages) and I'm hoping that this gives him the lay of the land of how our strange world works.

Re: What Is Code?

#316

Post by tommorris »

ryandrake wrote: post #108

It'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…

It's perfectly acceptable. Business optimises for least-knowledge-you-can-get-away-with.

Three generations of my dad's side of the family were in the print industry: everything from printing Vogue and Playboy to fancy art books to dull but well-paid corporate stuff (annual reports, mergers and stock issue documents—500 page books that the SEC make you print filled with legalese that nobody reads).

Most people working in big print companies know nothing about print. They don't know about how paper works or how ink works. They have no understanding of how colour works or why you can't print certain colours on certain materials, or how long certain types of print work takes. Not at the junior level and not at the management level.

Hell, if you took half the people in a big print management company and asked them to explain the basics of offset printing, they couldn't give you a "lead paragraph of Wikipedia"-level description. And that technology has been around since 1875.

For all but a small set of technical and management roles, a lot of businesses are far less interested in technical know-how than "soft skills". In a shocking number of places, the ability to build a tower out of rolled up newspaper and sticky tape in a team building exercise is valued over an ability to know the details of how the industry or its core technologies work.

Re: What Is Code?

#317

Post by 72deluxe »

cmorgan31 wrote: post #67
Kabukks wrote: post #25

Holy CPU time! That site consumes 100% of my CPU (presumably 100% of one core) whenever it is in the front tab (Firefox/OS X). Anyone else experiencing that or is it just my laptop running wild?

You'll see similar resource consumption when using event listeners tied to the mouse movement. It's generally not noticed by the general populace, but gives every developer a pause. The page does seem to struggle at times.

Very informative, thanks. In native land we can listen to mouse motion but it is more CPU friendly to have a timer and poll the mouse position periodically, particularly if the location of the cursor causes further processing (like working out what data to display in a popup hint). The good thing with the mouseEnter / mouseLeave is that you can stop the timer and only restart polling when they enter again.

Is there a way of doing this on web pages or is it really still just callbacks for mouse motion?

Re: What Is Code?

#318

Post by smorrow »

Hytosys wrote: post #300
notNow wrote: post #143

Watch it when capitalists pushing incessantly people to learn coding. They're trying very hard to cut the costs of their input "materials" and they will do everything that they could to devalue us in every way possible. So, if you're a talented and competent dev, be super aggressive with these predators and take everything your hands can grab before they have the upper hand and show us their true colors. Happy Coding…

This is egregious if you replace "coding" with "writing" or "reading". Historically, any perceived detriments of mass education have been significantly outweighed by benefits.

That's true, but it's also true that you can only add so much stuff to the syllabus, and then there'll be too much school.

You've got to draw the line at some point. Why not draw it at boring computer stuff that barely anybody needs to know?

Re: What Is Code?

#319

Post by atemerev »

notNow wrote: post #143

Watch it when capitalists pushing incessantly people to learn coding. They're trying very hard to cut the costs of their input "materials" and they will do everything that they could to devalue us in every way possible. So, if you're a talented and competent dev, be super aggressive with these predators and take everything your hands can grab before they have the upper hand and show us their true colors. Happy Coding…

Capitalists want people to be generally happy. Happy people buy more things. People who have useful well-paid jobs are generally happy (and can buy more things). Everybody knows that there will be huge drop in available jobs next few years, but software development skills will still be in high demand. Hence, capitalists want more people to learn how to code, so they could keep their jobs, so they can be generally happy and buy more things.

Capitalism _is_ profit-oriented, but happy people bring more profit.

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