Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years

johnkurkowski.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–97 of 97 posts

Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years

#91

Post by phantom_oracle »

smoyer wrote: post #8
phantom_oracle wrote: post #4

Visual-based programming is definitely something that can help more people solve problems, but it gets complex to manage too (or so we've been told by blogs and others). Perhaps something like visual-based programming would suit a different mindset altogether. Truth be told though, programmers have managed to solve the website problem with all the new site-builders out there. They all seem to be "drag and drop", whic…

The last (natively compiled) program I wrote to run on the Windows OS was done using an almost completely visual programming tool called ProGraph [1]. It worked well, and the small cards containing the code made sure you didn't put too much logic in one picture (much like the character limit Forth imposes on its page size). The system lives on as Marten [2], but only supports Mac OSX now. While there are some things…

That's quite an interesting product you have there.

Were you only able to build it by writing code itself?

Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years

#92

Post by xerophtye »

cookingrobot wrote: post #84
xerophtye wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The current state of painting sucks. You have to figure out which colour mixes with which colour to become what. You have to learn how to hold the brush and what different brushes do. you have to learn different strokes. It shouldn't be like that at all, you shouldn't have to LEARN all those arcane things at all. People have been doing it for CENTURIES and they are unwilling to change due to some perverse pride in a…

Nobody seems to be giving the author the benefit of the doubt - so I'll play devils advocate against your analogy. "The current state of painting as a way to capture images sucks. It takes years of practice, and even then the likeness created is only ok unless you're a true master. There's this area of research around lenses and films that professional painters seem to scoff at - but I really think we could be doing…

Hahah funny thing is I had these thoughts as i typed my last reply.

Btw it's rather interesting how the same cycle begins in photography where old school photographers scoff at post-capture editing via photoshop and say that it takes away from the beauty of the art. So maybe even if we get visual programming, maybe things won't change...

But still, I gotta ask, how can you learn programming without learning HOW to program? The HOW is where code comes in. Yes, we'd all love the magic of making the computer do as you wish with a point of a finger. But until then, why not enjoy the process of taking a problem, thinking of a solution and figuring out how to explain that to the computer?

Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years

#93

Post by jmaclabs »

chris_mahan wrote: post #47

I left this comment at the blog: Perhaps coding will look like minecraft, where you dig physical paths for the water, for the chickens, and hunt down bugs with bows and arrows. Modern tablets with no keyboards do minecraft just fine (my 8 year old and all his friends are completely addicted to minecraft). Also, they can join lan games, and work in the same virtual world. This may allow multiuser programming, no? Weir…

I think this type of a concept is what the author is driving at. We shouldn't be manipulating blocks of words, we should be manipulating what those blocks of words create into making even bigger things.

Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years

#95

Post by john-kurkowski »

nevir wrote: post #49
jimbokun wrote: post #18

My paraphrase of this article: "All of the blood sweat and tears poured into making programming more productive over the years just isn't good enough. No, I haven't done anything, personally, to improve the situation. My plan is to continue bitching about how things aren't good enough until...well, indefinitely, because bitching about other people's efforts is much easier than doing the hard work of solving a challen…

I read it as: "programming could be so much better; I have a glimpse of what it could be like, but don't know how to get there."

I totally understand the viewpoint though that there were 0 solutions in the article. A rant like that is off-putting. Still, I felt it worthwhile to bring awareness to the, ah, malarkey in programming.

Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years

#96

Post by john-kurkowski »

tbirdz wrote: post #10
asdasf wrote: post #3

Why 10 years? Given that we've known what a mess the software development world is for 50 years and nothing has improved, what makes you think anything will be better 10 years from now?

Might be a reference to the famous Norvig essay: "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years"?

No, I'm not that clever. It seemed like a reasonable time to check back in and see if the revolution happened.

Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years

#97

Post by andescotia »

phantom_oracle wrote: post #91
smoyer wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last (natively compiled) program I wrote to run on the Windows OS was done using an almost completely visual programming tool called ProGraph [1]. It worked well, and the small cards containing the code made sure you didn't put too much logic in one picture (much like the character limit Forth imposes on its page size). The system lives on as Marten [2], but only supports Mac OSX now. While there are some things…

That's quite an interesting product you have there. Were you only able to build it by writing code itself?

At the risk of some criticism, I would like to make some visual language comments. I am the author of a visual language programming environment called Marten which supports the Prograph visual language. I use this IDE everyday to write commercial-grade software for clients. Marten is in fact written in Prograph using Marten. I have created software in many other languages such as FORTRAN, RATFOR, C, C++, C#, Objective-C, Java, Perl, Python, along with i386 and PPC assembly, so I am very familiar with the difference between programming in a text-based language and visual programming. I found that visual programming is so superior to using text-based languages that I wrote my own IDE to ensure that I could continue to do so. Consequently, Marten stands as an example that not only is visual-programming not "vaporware", it can be an valuable and powerful addition to a developer's toolkit.
Post reply on HN