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If You're Not Writing a Program, Don't Use a Programming Language [video]

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Re: If You're Not Writing a Program, Don't Use a Programming Language [video]

#91

Post by emodendroket »

vishnugupta wrote: post #24
UK-Al05 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the oldies I know prefer static typing. A lot of the new people use dynamic types because that's all they know.

This. I'm an oldie and I prefer static typing. Heck, I can't even get my head around dynamically typed languages. And for any non-trivial production level software I strongly believe the choice of programming language has no bearing on the productivity. I.e., a team of Java experts will be as much productive in a Java stack as a team of python experts in a Python stack. A big reason for the recent shift towards dynam…

I agree. People obsess about the choice of programming language, insisting that months of study are needed to choose. I just don't see it except for very specialized tools or applications.

That said, I find maintaining an old, large application written in an untyped language pretty miserable.

Re: If You're Not Writing a Program, Don't Use a Programming Language [video]

#92

Post by zackmorris »

I wasn't exposed to spreadsheets until a few years into college back around 1996 or 1997 maybe (I had been programming in C/C++ for 7 or 8 years by then). I wasn't taught matrix math until pretty late in the curriculum, I want to say junior or senior year. Also I was lucky to have a semester of Scheme but they were transitioning to teaching Java around the time I graduated (I don't know if they ever switched back). And this was for a computer engineering degree at one of the best state universities for engineering in the US.

Honestly I think it might be time to phase out teaching imperative and object-oriented programming. Most of the grief in my career has come from them. I don't care if they're where the jobs are. The mental cost of tracing through highly-imperative code, especially the new implicit style of languages and frameworks like Ruby and AngularJS (which have logic flows having no obvious connection to one another, or transition through async handlers connected by a convention which isn't immediately obvious to the developer) is so high that the underlying business logic is effectively obfuscated.

I think we should get back to fundamentals. Maybe start with the shell and explain why separate address spaces connected by pipes are such a powerful abstraction, maybe touch on the Actor model, maybe show how spreadsheets and functional programming are equivalent, and how even written notation is superfluous. Really focus on declarative programming and code as media, and how that made the web approachable by nontechnical folks before it was turned into single page application spaghetti. There are so many examples from history of where better ways were found before the mainstream fell back into bad habits.

Re: If You're Not Writing a Program, Don't Use a Programming Language [video]

#93

Post by dvlsg »

maxxxxx wrote: post #31
stcredzero wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you remove a lot of the cruft and redundancy and add memory management, a statically typed language with fast compiles can have some of the benefits of a dynamic language. If I could have a dynamic language, and static typing, that would be the best of both worlds. However, gradual typing doesn't seem to have caught on.

With C# you can mix dynamic and static to some degree. In some cases like parsing JSON dynamic code can be much shorter. But for maintainability the dynamic code parts should be kept localized and to a minimum/

Works pretty well in typescript, too.

I don't find myself actually using gradual typing though. Not very often at least. Even in prototypical stages of an application, I usually just put together the types of what I currently have, even if I think they will change later.

Re: If You're Not Writing a Program, Don't Use a Programming Language [video]

#94

Post by btilly »

simias wrote: post #21
aidenn0 wrote: post #3

I haven't watched the full talk, so let me know if this gets explored by Lamport, but... Here's a thought: PL researchers seem to generally agree that typed languages are superior to untyped languages, yet programmers tend to prefer untyped languages to typed languages, to the point where Java and C++ have the fanciest type systems in common use, with ML being the closest thing to an academic language that gets signi…

>yet programmers tend to prefer untyped languages to typed languages The more strongly typed a language is the more it forces you to think about the big picture and architecture your entire application in a way that will map nicely to the type system. For instance with a language like Rust which is both strongly typed and integrates concepts like lifetimes into the type system you need to think long and hard early on…

I believe that Steve Yegge got it right in https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/KaSKeg4v... and it is all about your political leaning. Or more precisely, it is about how much ceremony you are willing to go through for some promised benefit. If you're willing to go through a lot of ceremony, you're a software conservative. If you don't see a point to the ceremony (either because it gets in your way, or you don't believe that the promised benefit is no that big), then you're a software liberal. Which you are likely to be is a combination of a function of your personality, and what kind of software you write.

It really isn't about competence. Competent programmers can fall into either camp. However there is a strong tendency for people to conclude that people who disagree with them are incompetent. As you just did. And then backed up to realize that there are good people who disagree with you.

I would also disagree with your weaker conclusion. In general bad programmers agree with whatever role-model they have most recently imprinted on. If they've picked up a Java book that talks about typing, they assume that it is right and types are worthwhile. If they pick up a PHP book, then vice versa. The current popularity of Javascript and Python mean that a lot are going to be on the dynamic side, but far from all.

Re: If You're Not Writing a Program, Don't Use a Programming Language [video]

#95

Post by moron4hire »

I think he makes an assumption that is fundamentally incorrect in the vast majority of cases: that the people owning the programs care about specification.

There is a huge, dark-matter body of software development that goes on in the world under the thumb of megalomaniacs whose only metric of productivity is how much unpaid overtime his programmers are working.

Re: If You're Not Writing a Program, Don't Use a Programming Language [video]

#96

Post by wellpast »

about_help wrote: post #46
jkingsbery wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's quite likely that during their lifetime, machine learning will completely change the nature of programming." - Why is this the case? Even if it's true, it hardly seems obviously true.

Because soon you will just ask your computer to build your code after giving it a few parameters. Then you will proof read and sanity check the code and spend more time optimizing and working on the really hard problems.

This still hardly seems obvious.

Re: If You're Not Writing a Program, Don't Use a Programming Language [video]

#97

Post by Retra »

about_help wrote: post #46
jkingsbery wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's quite likely that during their lifetime, machine learning will completely change the nature of programming." - Why is this the case? Even if it's true, it hardly seems obviously true.

Because soon you will just ask your computer to build your code after giving it a few parameters. Then you will proof read and sanity check the code and spend more time optimizing and working on the really hard problems.

How soon? I don't know of any software I've written for which that could be done. The first program I ever wrote was an implementation of Tic-Tac-Toe, and I can't imagine a set of parameters to produce that which aren't specifically for making games of that nature while also being easier to select than writing the code myself. I'd bet such a system is impossible in general, and that that should be the obvious conclusion.

Now, machine learning to find bugs or adjust variables... yeah. I can see that.

Re: If You're Not Writing a Program, Don't Use a Programming Language [video]

#98

Post by stcredzero »

btilly wrote: post #88
stcredzero wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you remove a lot of the cruft and redundancy and add memory management, a statically typed language with fast compiles can have some of the benefits of a dynamic language. If I could have a dynamic language, and static typing, that would be the best of both worlds. However, gradual typing doesn't seem to have caught on.

Gradual typing has a strong tendency to turn into never-typing because when you've got it running there is no real point to going back and adding types. Which divides people back into those who want dynamic typing and those who want static typing.

Tracing JIT VMs gather the information on what the types actually are at runtime. I wish that such JIT VMs running server software would gather such information, which could then be automatically applied.

Re: If You're Not Writing a Program, Don't Use a Programming Language [video]

#99

Post by xamuel »

about_help wrote: post #46
jkingsbery wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's quite likely that during their lifetime, machine learning will completely change the nature of programming." - Why is this the case? Even if it's true, it hardly seems obviously true.

Because soon you will just ask your computer to build your code after giving it a few parameters. Then you will proof read and sanity check the code and spend more time optimizing and working on the really hard problems.

Assuming you could concretely nail down all the vague terms you just used, I'd be willing to bet real money we won't have anything remotely like that within the next 10 years :)

Re: If You're Not Writing a Program, Don't Use a Programming Language [video]

#100

Post by pjmlp »

azhenley wrote: post #50
bilg21 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that why you have titles such as Software Engineer, Developer, Programmer? Software Engineer should have the engineering background and tackles hard problems whereas Developers and Programmers focus on products and features.

All of these terms are used mostly interchangeably, and it just depends on what company you are at. For example, Microsoft calls them all SDEs (Software Development Engineer) and Google calls them Software Engineers.

In many countries it is illegal to do so unless those people are actual engineers with accredited degree by the engineers' college.
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