Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
johnkurkowski.com
Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
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Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
#2Eye opening at certain points, dragged on at others. Either way I'm more excited to code. I mean, program. :)
Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
#3Why 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?
Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
#4Visual-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", which should have been addressed long ago as a standard for at least the frontend.
Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
#5"A relief from the unintuitive, unscalable, unfounded snake oils like OOP, markup, APIs, or the triumvirate of HTML/CSS/JS. As if these technologies are the best we can do."
At first I was mad. Then I read the above quote and everything clicked into place. This article is hilarious and I love every shrill, indignant, purposefully absurd word of it.
Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
#6I don't think programming should be mainstream, I think software should simple and intuitive enough to let anyone get work done without having to know how to write code.
Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
#7Man, people are so overly sensitive... it's almost like someone is trying to promote job security.
Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
#8Visual-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 I like about visual programming, there are also many issues - perhaps the biggest is that it lulls the developer into believing they don't need to understand the underlying computer. I think a similar analogy is how a newbie RoR developer can create a CRUD application without ever looking at or understanding the scaffold-generated code.
I've thought about this a lot (in fact, years before I found ProGraph I tried to develop a system I called FloPro which was standard Fortran flow-charts on the front end and generated C (to compile on your local platform) on the backend), but I haven't seen a solution to these problems in any visual programming system.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prograph [2] http://www.andescotia.com/products/marten/
Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
#9Hold 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 likely still be a research toy as well.
Re: Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Program – But Come Back in 10 Years
#10Why 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"?