I don't know if I agree with the author since they didn't seem to provide any evidence / argument for why the future is codeless. They did warn me though that I wouldn't be able to understand from my vantage point in Silicon Valley though so maybe other people see the argument? But from my perspective code is only growing without showing signs of abating.
First off, I agree. I agree that everyone who continually says "programming" is dying and in 5 - 10 years, "AI" will be writing code (or whatever else they can dream up) have no idea what they are taking about.
Programming is definitely going to get easier and I don't doubt that it will become a common skill.
I just doubt this idea that professional programming is a dying art or something. It is just silly to say that because tools that lower the barrier of entry are becoming more common, that the entire profession will soon be dead.
(Also, I am like 75% sure that it was a sponsored article to advertise for the company named in the article)
> It is just silly to say that because tools that lower the barrier of entry are becoming more common, that the entire profession will soon be dead.
Is actually due to Labor Supply vs. Labor Demand. I can envision a world where majority of jobs are all replaced by machines (from Baristas to Accountants), and web/software development (among other fields, such as specialized medicine) are some of the last places for people to remain self-sufficient off their own labor. With this over-abundance of supply, employers are capable of being extremely discretionary over their hires, and are able to pay just enough for their human capital to sustain themselves.
I think we are on the same page, but I was genuinely hoping someone could fill in the gaps the author seemed to be hand waving about. Is programming going to become an easier skill? Absolutely. What does that have to do with the means? What evidence do we have that drag and drop interfaces will replace the majority of coding? Why not something like swift playgrounds or some other IDE innovation that make the coding easier but get out of the way to expose the text if need be? Why is that harmful? Why is that not coding anymore?
Programming won't be any easier. It's like claiming that in the future thinking will get easier. I'd claim otherwise: keeping in mind recent trends of "outsourcing" the knowledge many brains just don't have enough building block in working memory to do complicated thinking.
Another SV resident, I can understand given WYSIWYG tools and CMS like WordPress it would "only seem logical" that eventually nobody needs to code and we just magically make things work.
I think the problem with that assumption is that there has been virtually no traction on "just telling the computer what to do" - whether text or voice. There is also the assumption that programming is not getting more difficult. While not everyone is working on "capital E" engineering efforts, it's a bit ridiculous to think that our jobs are getting easier to automate in the wake of Internet of Things, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and projects like Web Assembly pushing browser-based development into interesting, new places.
Just because we made it easy to set up a blog doesn't mean we made it easy to "program with words".
Coding in a good language already consists of writing about the things you care about, not the things the computer cares about. Text (with a few symbols) turns out to be the best way to express computations, not to a computer but to a human reader/maintainer.
The future is most professionals writing code as part of their job, just as the present is most professionals writing as part of their job.
> To get there, programming tools should first use our language. For instance, to turn a button red, we shouldn’t have to write code. We should just be able to point to the button and select a shade of red.
Yeah but web developers still tend to do it the "hard way" but editing the CSS directly. Why do web developers still do it that way even though visual tools exist?
My guess is because with working with text is more efficient. The cognitive load of finding a setting in the UI, moving your mouse to it, and selecting the value is far greater than just typing.
And so can IDE generated code from drag and drop controls.
Visual Studio and many others have this out of the box but there's plenty of companies that do well selling exactly this like telerik.
I personally don't and been doing it the "hard way" since the beginning because it feels less confining. And I don't want to rely on an IDE to build something. Plus the code it generates was always kind of kludgy.
This does make me wonder if developers tend to be involved in more forms of creative expression (roleplaying, art, etc.) than in creative consumption (gaming, movies, etc.), what intersection(s) exist and why...
> Why do web developers still do it that way even though visual tools exist?
Visual editors don't work so well with pages where parts are static & parts are dynamically generated. (Like, a css class may be different based on the data that it's showing). And at this point, pretty much every page in a web app has dynamic parts.
I like smart tools. I can open CSS in Idea. It'll highlight colour values. Then I can click on that colour and change it using colour picker. I think that it uses the best of both worlds.
I think python strikes a good balance, naturalish language whenever possible, without forcing it into places where it doesn't fit. At least that's the feel I got from it.
That's exactly what Bubble does. Having played with it a bit it seems pretty nice ...basically the latest iteration of tools like Klik & Play or Mediator from the 1990s. You get a visual designer with a few basic widgets, a simple workflow editor that allows for basic sequences of actions and so on. It's programming stripped down to the absolute basics. You get a database, a simple visual query builder thingie that vaguely resembles English, etc.
I just showed it to my girlfriend who is learning Python. Her comment was "hmm but is this really easier than learning to code"? Well, it probably IS a lot easier, as long as your app fits within the constraints of what Bubble can do.
The problem with such tools is always that you very quickly hit the limits of what they can do, and then you're stuck. You can't easily peel back the abstraction and go deeper. You end up having to scrap the project or just give up on certain things. Bubble's "language" can't do looping, for instance. You can apparently write snippets of Javascript to do other stuff, but then you're back to needing to learn programming again.
Cobol had that idea, and Applescript took it farther. For example:
tell application "Safari" to activate
It starts to get unwieldy because there are so many parts of speech, and remembering them all and how they fit is a pain. Some people call Applescript a "read only" language because of this.
"Looking like a natural language" doesn't make the language easier to use, at least until we have AI compilers.
Good!
Now, the button should be a slightly different shade if the user is logged in. And it should be blue if the user is an administrator. And the customer requested that it shouldn't show up at all if the user lacks the 'foo' privilege.
“50 years from now, I can’t imagine people programming as we do today. It just can’t be."
Dear writer, let me introduce you to FORTRAN, COBOL, LISP, or BASIC.
These are alive languages, all 50+ years old.
Coding didn't change much. The languages, the methodologies, the ideas change, but the approach is the same, and whoever thinks this will soon (50 years is not _that_ far) changes, have never had to debug something nasty. Doing that with voice commands in my opinion is significantly harder compared to what we have now.
We will have tools, accessible, easy tools; Arduinos and Pis of the future; sure. But it will not replace, nor eliminate or reduce the amount of code written.
I did miss that, true; however, Assembly is heavily architecture-tied. Therefore x86 Assembly significantly differs from, for example, ARM assembly, but nonetheless I should have mentioned it.
Its annoyingly incompatible and RISC is more verbose but really the concepts are pretty much the same. Load something to a register, do some very basic operations on said registers and save it out. An X86 programmer should be able to pick up other CPUs fairly easily. Although delay slots will probably piss them off every time.
I agree, though I think there are improvements that could make things better even for existing languages. It just doesn't seem to be a main focus of our industry.
50 years from now, I can't imagine people driving cars as we do today. I do know that human-operated cars are old, but it does not mean that we can't do better nowadays.
>Doing that with voice commands in my opinion is significantly harder compared to what we have now.
You could have automations around that though. A lot of manual work could be replaced with little AI bots that do the work. And since this work is not really "creative", it could be done through AI.
>> We will have tools, accessible, easy tools; Arduinos and Pis of the future; sure. But it will not replace, nor eliminate or reduce the amount of code written.
I think something eventually will, though. My reasoning for this conclusion is simply that I don't believe a significantly larger percentage of people will learn to write production software than are able to do so now. At the same time the need for software in every sector continues to grow, leading to some varying levels of scarcity in programmers. That's a massive economic opportunity, and so people will continue to pound at that nut until it cracks.
Not all nuts are crackable. I agree, though, that people will continue to pound. Even if it doesn't crack, we may find a way for many people to get things done without learning to write "production" code.
We will keep making developers more and more productive. And if there aren't enough of us to solve all the problems, well tough luck - let them unsolved, every profession is like that.
But if we create an AI that can understand people well enough to know what those people want without clear instructions, yes, we will have placed us out of the job market, together with everybody else.
There's a serious gap in the writer's mind about computation and programming. It's like the author is suggesting that "eventually we won't need writing: it will be replace by writing-thinking or picture-writing". It's completely absurd. Specific, complex ideas can only be described and communicated in text. Not pictures. Blueprints, for example, have a pictorial element to them, but their fundamental value is our ability to use the formal language to analyze what's on the plan and whether it is correct or not. To the degree that a picture or a motion graphic can formally accomplish this is to the degree that it is supported by a specific language under the covers. Not the other way around.
Blueprints/schematics are far, far superior at conveying the information they do compared to a written narrative. Given the ease of preparing written text compared to drawing schematics nobody would go to the trouble of doing so if that weren't the case.
Of course, all of the pieces of information that blueprints and schematics are conveying are 2D layouts. Once you're out of the realm of things whose forms can be reproduced at reduced scale, or simplified to functional equivalents that lie on a plane, the types of useful visual representations of things are sharply reduced; they become extremely stylized, and symbolic. At that point, you've basically arrived at language again.
When I write "2.5 mm" this is not narrative. If you want to explain "2.5 mm" without using text, how would you do that? The only way to do it is to use something literal from the real world. That's what we're talking about when we're comparing blueprints to programming. I think the word is literal. Can't avoid the need for text when it's precision we're after.
If you had a blueprint of the whole of NewYork city, you surely would need some tool to abstract away the maze of individual lines and be able to refer-to/work-with concepts like "Central Park", "the Harlem", or "Brooklyn Bridge".
It is not about how much more information can we convey, but how much less data must be expended to present a tractable model of reality to the human operator. Conveying more details is worse than useless, it results in informationi overload and cognitive stagnation.
Historically, the way it happened in computer programming is those tools are text based. This is as much about the early use of computers as clerical aids to process business data, and the early synergies between computation and linguistics. Maybe it can be done, but it will require millions of man hours to accomplish. And almost nobody wants to invest in doing so because of the cost of opportunity.
In Google Maps, the ability to zoom relies heavily in a (unacknowledged) property of the problem domain: planar geometry. If every relevant detail is nicely clustered together and, more importantly, every irrelevant detail is nicely clustered far away from wherever you are zoomming-in, then sure!
If, on the other hand, you cannot ever be 100% sure that fixing one stop light in Brooklyn will cause a bunch sewage lines to flush out to the street in Long Island, then zooming does more harm than good. At the end of day, you need the map to conform to the realities of the territory. If that gets in the way of that pretty abstraction of yours, then the abstraction - not reality - is wrong. And when that is the case, you need to start over and make a better map.
Text based toolchains are, for all their limitations, a (sufficiently) reality conformant map. It does not mean there cannot be others; but as of today I do not know about any suitable candidate.
Just imagine a compiler that scans your diagram written by hand on a piece of paper, translate it into AST then interpret it or even produce an executable.
An interesting angle on the topic comes from my father who at one time was a project manager and designer in the construction industry. In the days before computers he would painstakingly hand-draw the design that was reproduced as blueprints, that was the role of the "draftsman".
But the drawing wasn't the source of stress, rather it was the project "specification" that he sweated. The issue was the spec was a legal, text-format document detailing the size of beams, type of wire, plumbing, fixtures, etc. He had to assure that beams were sufficient to support structure, electrical wiring was safe and up to code, etc. A mistake could expose the contractor and himself to legal liability if a component failed, so an accurate spec was a task he took seriously.
Of course the subject of program specifications is commonly discussed, though often doesn't have the same significance that my father experienced. I guess in most cases program crashes don't have the same impact that a roof caving in would entail. In situations where crashing can't be tolerated, the spec will mean a whole lot more.
I work in the same construction design industry. The drawings themselves are also contractually binding. Many smaller jobs forgo the written specifications altogether.
My father had mostly worked on larger projects, like tract houses and the like. Of course, times change, my recollection was of how things were a long time ago. My comment was just illustrating an instance where relying on a text description was still important even though there was a graphic format as well.
Your info was relevant to the idea of that at some level of complexity it becomes necessary to use text vs. only graphic presentation. Maybe in construction that occurs when there are more than a few elevations to juggle, but you probably know much more about it than me.
I don't think we can distinguish text and pictures so easily. Look at Chinese, look at Egytian hieroglyphs. Even when "hierglyphics" is used as as a term of abuse of for programming languages synatax -- it ends up pretty popular.
I thoroughly hated LabView when I had to program in it, but it did convince me that a graphical programming language could work -- if only it refrained from doing the cking stupid things that LabView did (such as the strongly typed editor* that would automatically progate the any type error it found, but not your fixes).
In my current C++ work, I would dealy love a graphical tool that showed me where any given value came from, much like LabView does by its very nature.
I think we can distinguish. The ideograms and hieroglyphs have very, very specific rules about they can recombine, and that nothing to do with their pictorial aspects. It has to do with semantic / grammatical aspects.
> I thoroughly hated LabView when I had to program in it, but it did convince me that a graphical programming language could work
That's funny. I came away with the opposite opinion. Text is much better at describing details and it's much easier to be consumed by various things: people, editors, analysis tools, web apps, test engines, code generators, code transformation tools, ... I could go on.
Languages like LabView never have a complete toolchain (Prove me wrong by posting a small piece of editable LabView in a reply to this HN comment). They work well as domain specific languages, but that's about it.
"I don't think we can distinguish text and pictures so easily. Look at Chinese, look at Egytian hieroglyphs."
My understanding is linguistics research has pretty thoroughly debunked this idea.
Don't remember the experimental design (was a long time ago, sorry), but I believe a study showed Chinese readers basically translate the characters back into the sounds of spoken language in their heads, before any processing of meaning takes place. In other words, pictographic mnemonics may be helpful when first learning the characters, but play no role for a fluent reader.
I suspect a similar thing will be true with programming for a long time to come. Even if you try to replace keyboard characters with other icons, it will be just substituting one arbitrary association between symbols and meaning with another. (Which is basically what language boils down to, anyway.)
As someone who is awful at Pictionary, I hope so as well. Just today, I defined a class with 4 functions. I had another function that created an instance of the class and called one of the functions. It changed a variable that would show up in the web browser formatted by CSS. And I can't even draw a dog in Pictionary...
Yes, in that the tools are massively better. So is the hardware that it all runs on.
No, in that you still have to tell the computer precisely and unambiguously exactly what you want it to do, and how, mostly in text. The level of detail required today is somewhat less, due to better tools, but at a high level the work hasn't changed.
That has changed significantly too though. Sorry about this being a long post, but having programmed through most of the last 50 years, I've seen a massive shift in the way people code even from a language perspective:
1) There's a massive reliance on reusable libraries these days. Don't get me wrong, this is a good thing, but it means people spend less time rewriting the "boring" stuff (for want a lazy description) and more time wring their program logic.
2) Most people are coding in languages and/or language features that are several abstractions higher than they were 50 years ago. Even putting aside web development - which is probably one of the widest used frameworks these days - modern languages and even modern standards of old languages have templates, complex object systems, and all sorts of other advanced features that a compiler needs to convert into a runtime stack. Comparatively very few people write code that directly maps as closely to hardware as they did 50 years ago.
3) And expanding on my former point, a great many languages these days compile to their own runtime environment (as per the de facto standard language compiler): Java, Javascript, Python, Scala, Perl, PHP, Ruby, etc. You just couldn't do that on old hardware.
4) Multi-threaded / concurrency programming is also a big area people write code in that didn't exist 50 years ago. Whether that's writing POSIX threads in C, using runtime concurrency in languages like Go (goprocesses) which don't map directly to OS threads, or even clustering across multiple servers using whatever libraries you prefer for distributed processing, none of this was available in the 60s when servers were a monolithic commodity and CPUs were single core. Hence why time sharing on servers was expensive and why many programmers used write their code out by hand before giving it to operators to punch once computing times was allocated.
So while you're right that we still write statements instructing the computer, that's essentially the minimum you'd expect to do. Even in Star Trek with the voice operated computers, it's users are commanding the computer with a series of statements. One could argue that is a highly intuitive REPL environment which mostly fits your "you still have to tell the computer precisely and unambiguously exactly what you want it to do..." statement yet is worlds apart from the they we program today.
Expanding on your above quote, "mostly in text": even that is such a broad generalisation that it overlooks quite a few interesting edge cases that didn't exist 50 years ago:
1) web development with GUI based tools (I some people will argue that web development isn't "proper" programming, but it is one of the biggest areas in which people write computer code these days. So it can't really be ignored. And there are a lot of GUI tools that write a lot of that code for the developer / designer. Granted hand crafted code is almost always better, but fact remains they still exist.
2) GUI mock ups with application-orientated IDEs. I'm talking about Visual Basic, QtCreator, Android Studio, etc where you can mock up the design of the UI in the IDE using drawing tools rather than writing creating the UI objects manually in code.
3) GUI based programming languages (eg Scratch). Granted these are usually aimed as teaching languages, but they're still an interesting alternative to the "in text" style programming languages. There's also an esoteric language which you program with coloured pixels.
So your generalisation is accurate, but perhaps not fair given the number of exceptions
Lastly: "The level of detail required today is somewhat less, due to better tools, but at a high level the work hasn't changed.":
The problem with taking things to that high level is it then becomes comparable with any instruction-based field. For example, cook books have a lis...
You can't necessarily judge the future of of a technology by its past. Consider transportation. Imagine it's 1936, automobiles have been around for 50 years, but there are still plenty of people getting around by horse. Some people are claiming that in another 50 years, by 1986, horses will be hardly used for transportation compared to cars, other people say that horses have been used for thousands of years, there's no way they'll ever go out of style.
Programming languages exist today because computers can't handle ambiguity and don't understand software design. In another 50 years, machines will be a lot smarter, more able to handle ambiguity, and better than people at designing workflows and catching potential errors. Like the horse, no doubt some people will still prefer to do things the old way, but there's a good chance this will be limited mostly to academic exercises.
All they're saying here is that the tools we have will progress a lot in the next 50 years. There are some obvious problems with the way we design software right now which are due to human limitations. The only way to fix those is to remove a lot of direct control from humans and give it to AI programmers. Manually writing JavaScript in 2066 will be like manually carving arrowheads today: still effective but not something you would do for a serious purpose.
There are currently no signs that what you think will happen will happen. Soft AI is the only place where anything is moving on that front and the movement is infinitesimally small. Here's an analogy for you: It took more than 1000 years (from Babylon to Archaic Greece) for us to go from writing with only consonants to using vowels for the first time.
Years don't make progress on their own, people working during those years push progress forward. The estimated population of ancient Babylon at its height was 200,000. Let's imagine that 1% of them were working on developing writing for at leat 2 hours every week and that those who came after them were able to maintain that level of work for 1000 years until ancient Greece, over 200 million hours of work. That's less time than the official Gangnam Style video has been watched on YouTube.
In 50 years, 99%+ of all the work ever done by civilization will be done after 2016.
As long as we're criticizing the analogies in the discussion (rather than the actual arguments) I'd say the hours spent do not have a consistent quality vis-a-vis solving hard problems. Because there are more absolute hours available does not mean that there are more hours available for solving hard AI problems. There are very likely less. And there has been virtually NO progress on the hard AI front.
Hard, human-level AI would help this a lot, but it isn't necessary. All that's required for traditional programming to become obsolete is for computers to be much better at understanding ambiguity and have a robust model for the flow of programs. With today's neural networks and technology, I have no doubt it would be possible to design something that would create good code based on all the samples on github. Not easy by any means or someone would have done it, but it doesn't require any breakthroughs of computer science, just lots of data and good design. The tools referenced in the articles are working primitive versions of this.
There's an important distinction though between being able to write a compiling (or even functional) program and being able to write a program that serves a particular purpose.
I'm talking about human-guided programming without using traditional programming language, creating a design document to lay out what it does and how data flows and allowing the computer to sort out the details based on a stored data set.
Why do you assume that this design document would be simpler to create than the traditional computer program? Because otherwise, this is exactly what happens now.
Design is always going to be a part of creating something. What this article is arguing is that manual typing of text by humans using traditional programming languages will not be the primary means of implementing those designs in the future. We don't yet know how to make computers into good designers, but we know that we can create tools that translate designs into executable code that can be less error-prone and more reliable than people typing letters into a text editor.
My question is how is drawing rather than writing simplifying anything i.e. what is the gain from moving from traditional programming to some sort of theoretical picture programming? Is it that you can draw lines between things rather than just assuming that the line from one symbol points to the next symbol on the line? Does that simplify things, or make them more complicated?
> we know that we can create tools that translate designs into executable code that can be less error-prone and more reliable than people typing letters into a text editor.
I disagree. Maybe you know, but I haven't seen any indication of the sort.
Drawing rather than writing is just one method. A lot of it will likely be conversational. I could imagine a designer with an AR overlay speaking to a computer which offers several prototypes based on an expressed intent. The designer chooses one and offers criticism just as a boss would review an alpha version and suggest changes. The machine responds to the suggestion and rewrites the program in a few fractions of a second. The designer continues the conversation, maybe draws out some designs with a pencil, describes a desire, references another program which the machine analyzes for inspiration, and the machine adjusts the code in response. This is just one of many possible examples. The point is that software design is trending toward more automation. Coding is not a new essential skill that everyone will need on the future. Human-machine interactions are trending toward natural and automated methods, not manual code entry. Most people need to learn to be creative, think critically, analyze problems, not learn the conventions of programming languages.
There has already been some significant progress on this front. E.g., SQL and logic programming let you describe what you want to happen, and let the computer figure out some of the details. Any compiler worth using does this, too. Smarter machines and smarter programs will mean smarter programming languages.
> I'm talking about human-guided programming without using traditional programming language, creating a design document to lay out what it does and how data flows and allowing the computer to sort out the details based on a stored data set.
Creating clear and accurate design documents is so much harder and more specialized a skill than programming that many places that do programming either avoid it entirely or make a pro-forma gesture (often after-the-fact) in its direction.
(I am only about half-kidding on the reasoning, and not at all about the effect.)
"creating a design document to lay out what it does and how data flows and allowing the computer to sort out the details based on a stored data set."
This is exactly what programmers do today. We just call the "design document" a "program".
Over time, our design documents become higher and higher level, with the programmer having to specify fewer details and leaving more of the work of sorting out the actual details to the computer.
Hard, human-level AI would help this a lot, but it isn't necessary. All that's required for traditional programming to become obsolete is for computers to be much better at understanding ambiguity and have a robust model for the flow of programs. With today's neural networks and technology, I have no doubt it would be possible to design something that would create good code based on all the samples on github. Not easy by any means or someone would have done it, but it doesn't require any breakthroughs of computer science, just lots of data and good design. The tools referenced in the articles are working primitive versions of this.
>It took more than 1000 years (from Babylon to Archaic Greece) for us to go from writing with only consonants to using vowels for the first time
Yeah and it took "us" 60 years from discovering flight to landing a rocket on the moon. Took "us" 60 years from the first computer to globally-live video streaming in your pocket. Time is a pointless metric when it comes to technology. You don't know what someone is cooking up down in some basement somewhere that will be released tomorrow and shatter your concept of reality.
I wonder if 'leisure-person years' is a better metric of progress (where 'leisure' is defined as the number of hours you can spend neither raising/searching for food nor sleeping).
> for us to go from writing with only consonants to using vowels for the first time
Speaking as someone who has studied cuneiform and Akkadian, I would say that this claim isn't true. Here's a vowel that predates the period that you mentioned[0].
> Here's an analogy for you: It took more than 1000 years (from Babylon to Archaic Greece) for us to go from writing with only consonants to using vowels for the first time.
Where did you get this idea? Babylonian writing fully indicated the vowels. It always has. You're thinking of Egyptian / Hebrew / Arabic writing.
Even where a semitic language was written in cuneiform, vowels were always indicated, because the cuneiform system didn't offer you the option to leave them out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_language#Vowels
(Old Persian was written in repurposed cuneiform, and therefore could have omitted the vowels, but didn't.)
Your example actually cuts the other way. Imagine it's 1966 and someone tells you that the cars, trains, and planes will "have to be dramatically different in 50 years," yet lo and behold a trip from NYC to LA takes about the same amount of time now as it did back then and the Northeast Regional is a hair slower than the Metroliner used to be.
I was focusing on 50 years into the development of the technology as a rough analogy. By 1966 it was much more mature, but look at how much things have changed. A mechanic from 1966 would find today's cars completely unrecognizable. They might appear somewhat similar from the outside, but on the inside they're basically just giant computers. We now have cars with varying levels of self-driving capabilities, drones replacing pilots, traditional pilots being essentially babysitters for autopilot systems, hyperloop designs. I'd say those are much bigger changes than 1936-1986.
Cars are not "basically just giant computers" on the inside. Computers are used to control various engine parameters, and aspects of the transmission and suspension, but all the parts that make the car go are just refined versions of what existed in the 1960s. Okay, so now we use computers to control valve timing instead of mechanical means. But the principles of what valves are and how they make the engine work are very similar to 1966.
And that computing horsepower mostly goes towards fuel efficiency and safety. Which is nice, but almost certainly not the kind of progress people in the 1960's thought we'd make in automobiles over 50+ years.
> traditional pilots being essentially babysitters for autopilot systems
The first autopilot takeoff/cruise/landing happened in 1947.
> hyperloop designs
But we don't have hyperloops.
> I'd say those are much bigger changes than 1936-1986.
By 1986 we had fully-digital fly-by-wire aircraft. Our big achievement since then has been about a 20% improvement in fuel efficiency.
The concept of what change is more or less significant can be pretty subjective. I'm not talking about things like fuel efficiency, although those are some really interesting facts. Autopilot in 1947! didn't know that one. Yes, cars and jets still use the same basic architecture for what makes them move, but the control mechanisms for that architecture have completely changed.
To bring your comparison closer to the subject at hand, this article has nothing to do with the design of computers themselves. We could use the same basic Von Neumann architecture in 50 years and still get rid of traditional programming languages as a primary method of designing software, just like we use the same basic engine designs from 50 years ago but use entirely different methods of designing and controlling them now.
Take an engineer designing a jet in 1966 and put them with a 2016 team. They will have to learn an entirely different workflow. Now computers are heavily involved in the design process and most of what was done manually by engineers is now written into software. The same situation will happen 50 years from now for people who design software.
Take an extreme example like game creation. In 1966, you could make a computer game, but you were doing manual calculations and using punch cards. Now you download Unity and almost everything but the art design and game logic is done for you. Game design moved quickly toward these kinds of automated systems because they tend to have highly reusable parts and rely mostly on art and story for what separates them from the competition. But there's no reason why this same concept wouldn't apply to tools used for any kind of program.
The horse to car comparison was only meant to show that the development of a technology in the first 50 years (or any arbitrary number) will not necessarily look like the next 50 years. Well-established tools quickly fall out of use when a disruptive technology has reached maturity, even if that tool has been used for thousands of years. Right now, software design is difficult, buggy, and causes constant failures and frustrations. Once we have established and recorded best practices that can be automated instead of manually remaking them every time, there will be no need for manual coding in traditional programming languages. Machines are getting much better at understanding intent, and this will be built into all software design.
"Take an engineer designing a jet in 1966 and put them with a 2016 team. They will have to learn an entirely different workflow."
Send them to the "PCs for seniors" course at the local library to learn the basics of clicking around on a computer. Then a one or two week training course on whatever software is used to design planes these days.
Getting up to date on modern "workflow" is not going to be a major hurdle for someone smart enough to design a jet. Heck, it's very likely there could be someone who started designed jets in 1966 and still designs them today. (Post retirement consultancy.)
My point was not that they wouldn't be able to learn it, only that the tools and methods of design have changed and become much more automated. That process has not stopped, only accelerated. The people in this article are saying that the process of making software in 50 years will be very different from the modern method. It will rely heavily on automation and what was done manually by writing in programming languages will be integrated into systems in which the intent of the designer is interpreted by a machine. You can see it in IDEs today. They already analyze and interpret code. This is extremely primitive compared to what we will have on 50 years. The progress of machine intelligence is clear and doesn't require any major breakthroughs to continue for the foreseeable future. It will be as irresponsible for most people to write everything manually in 50 years as it is not to use a debugger today. No doubt there will be people doing things the same way, just like we have traditional blacksmiths today, but we will not have billions of people typing into terminals in 50 years. The criticism is against the idea that in the future, everyone will need to learn how to code in the same way as everyone needs basic arithmetic. That is not a plausible version of the future. It's trending the other way, more automation, more code reuse, less manual entry.
"Now you download Unity and almost everything but the art design and game logic is done for you."
Yes, Unity helps to visually organize your game's data, and there are built in and downloadable components (which are all created by coders) that can be used to plug into your game, but it's just another set of abstractions. Most of the time you will be writing your own components in a traditional coding language or delving into other's component code to adapt it to actually make your game function. There ARE game creation systems intended for no coding required, but they come with the expected limitations of visual coding that people are bringing up in this thread. No, Unity doesn't really fall into this category, barring a few limited game domains.
Perhaps in 50 years every domain will be "mapped" in this way, with predefined components that work with each other and can be tweaked as needed, but I don't see how that could eliminate coding, or even displace it that much. Two reasons I think coding is here to stay:
1) Any sufficiently complex system needs it's organization to be managed. At a certain complexity, whatever system is replacing coding will become something that looks a lot like coding. At that level of complexity, text is easier to manage than a visual metaphor.
2) Most pieces of software need custom components, even if only to stand out. Those game creation systems with no coding? No one is impressed by the games that are created in those systems. Not because the system cannot produce something worthwhile - but because with everything looking the same, the value of that output drops substantially.
I think coding will only go away when programming does. When the computer is as intelligent and creative as we are. And that's a point which I do not want think about too much.
I think we'll reach that point in 50 years because we already have computers with certain types of intelligence that exceed ours. Translating a human intent into machine language does work with coding, but we have to admit that it's not ideal. There are too many mistakes and vulnerabilities. Even the smartest people create bugs.
This like the shift in transportation. A lot of people love driving and mistrust autonomous vehicles. But the tech is almost to the point where it's safer than human drivers. In most situations, it already is.
Another comparison would be SaaS. For a lot of companies, it's about risk mitigation. Moving responsibilities away from internal staff makes business sense in many cases.
This is a criticism of the idea that we need to make coding a basic life skill that everyone should focus on. It looks a lot like denial to some people.
Let's go back to transportation. Imagine if people were pushing the idea that commercial driving needs to be in every high school because driving was such a big employment area. Some people might say that the autonomous vehicles look like a big threat to job prospects, so maybe it's not such a good idea to focus on those particular skills.
Coding is great, provides a lot of opportunities to the people that it attracts, but it's a pretty specialized skill that's going to be increasingly displaced by more natural and automatic interfaces this century in all likelihood.
Well, it's dramatic in the little things, but not so much in the big things.
Cars now go 100,000 miles between tune-ups. They used to go, what? 10,000 miles?
Cars are much safer in collisions than they used to be.
Most cars now have air conditioners. I've driven in a car without AC in Arizona in July; believe me, AC can be a really big deal.
Most cars now have automatic transmissions, power steering, and power brakes.
And cars get much better fuel economy.
Driving from NYC to LA takes less time due to interstates and higher road speeds (and cars that can comfortably handle those speeds). Not half the time, but still a significant improvement.
And yet, most cars are not dramatically different as far as the experience of driving them is concerned. Nothing in the last 50 years looks revolutionary. It's been an accumulation of improvements, but there has been no game changer.
I suspect that the next 50 years in computing will be similar.
>Cars now go 100,000 miles between tune-ups. They used to go, what? 10,000 miles?
I'm curious what your definition of tune-up is, because I don't believe there exists a car that can go that far unmaintained without doing lasting damage to various systems.
After a quick Google, my impression is that most 2016 cars have a first maintenance schedule around 5k-6k miles. Some as low as 3,750.
I don't think an oil change is a tune up. Maybe it is.. My honda has 80k miles on it, and has had oil changes + tires replaced. That is it. Compare to a 1970s car and what it would need in the first 80k miles.
For even lower maintenance look at electric cars. I think Tesla has very very low maintenance requirements for the first years.
> I don't think an oil change is a tune up. Maybe it is.
It's not.
I have a couple of 60s Mustangs and several newer cars. My original '65 needs ignition service (what most people call a "tune up") every couple of years (of very modest usage). My '66, converted to electronic ignition, gets about twice as long (and 10x as many miles) before needing ignition service. They both end up fouling plugs because of the terrible mixture control and distribution inherent in their carbureted designs.
My wife's 2005 Honda CR-V gets about 100K to a set of plugs. (Fuel injection, closed loop mixture control, and electronic ignition are the key enhancements that enable this long a time between tune-ups.)
My diesel Mercedes and Nissan LEAF obviously never get tune ups.
No. I have the OM606 engine. Hydraulic lifters eliminate the need for mechanical valve adjustments as on the older diesels.
About the only thing I've done abnormal on the car in 7 years is replace two glow plugs. (And when the second one went, I actually replaced the 5 that hadn't been changed yet, since they are cheap and I didn't want to take the manifold off again to change #3...)
What do you mean by computers handling ambiguity? At the end of the day for a idea to become cristalized it needs to be free from ambiguity. That is the case even in human interactions. When using ambiguous language, we iterate over ideas together to make sure everybody is on the same page. If by handling ambiguity, you mean that computers can go back and forth with us to help us remove ambiguity from our thoughts then they are basically helping us think or in some sense do programming for us. That is a great future indeed! A future where actually AIs are doing the programming in long run! But with this line of thought we might as well not teach anything to our kids because one day computers will do it better. Specially if we already stablished that they can think better than us :)
Let's teach our kids the higher level stuff that doesn't ever get old, thinking clearly, engaging in creativity, solving problems, whether through code or whatever means appeals to them. Let's give them options and opportunities, not must mandate memorizing specific facts. Let's teach kids computer science instead of just programming, creative writing instead of just grammar, mathematics instead of just algebra, let's engage their imagination, not just their instincts to conform to expectations!
Let's teach them computer science with programming as a fantastic way to concretely demonstrate its abstract ideas. (The same goes for math vs. arithmetic!)
Yes, definitely. Too often the application of the idea is taught without understanding the idea itself. Then we get standardized testing and focus not even on the application but in what ways the application of the idea will be stated on a test. We still need the conceptual framework to learn anything lasting!
The best "programming" curricula aimed at general education teach (elements of both) generalized problem solving and computer science with programming in a particular concrete language or set of languages as a central component and vehicle for that (and often incidentally teach elements of a bunch of other domains through the particular exercises.)
This is particularly true, e.g., of How to Design Programs [0].
I've said this before, the reason code and CLI and texting and messaging all these text based modes of communicating and controlling computers are still popular is that they mirror one of the most intuitive and fundamental inventions humans have ever created: language, specifically, written language. Even speech doesn't rival written word in some contexts; for example, laws and organization rules, policies, are still written.
You can't beat written word. Corps are not lining up to rewrite their bylaws in a bunch of connected drag-and-droppable blocks. I really don't think it's just inertia, the preciseness, versatility,and ease of examination and editing, and permanence of written language is hard to beat. Same with source code.
I appreciate the context of your argument when you discuss the use of text in by-laws, but it's worth noting that there are lots of examples of by-laws being enforced via non-text mediums:
1) road signs, which are predominantly graphic based
2) public information signs. Eg no smoking. Also usually picture based albeit does often contain text instruction as well
3) beach flags indicating where to swim etc.
All of these are enforcing by-laws yet none specifically text driven. In fact when conveying simple rules to people, it often makes more sense to explain that in meaningful images as that enables anyone to understand the message, even if one doesn't understand the written language (eg tourists).
Right, note that in communication referring to written laws, people tend to use visual aids. This is also similar to how people try to visualize source code, like dependency graphs, inheritance graphs and such. In one case, we are reminding one about ideas using visuals and the other, we are helping comprehension of it.
However, the original specification, which in the case of the signs are laws and for software is code, is text, not in visuals. There in lies the difference. I think visual aids like dependency graphs will help us visualize code and communicate ideas like in the signs you mention, but due to the reasons I mentioned previously text will still be the preferred method for specification, or in software engineering, programming. For example, visuals only go so far. The best visual specifications I can think of are blueprints, which I'd argue still require a little of reading to understand. But in certain domains, as I said, text is a better medium.
50 years ago, it might be conceivable to build auto scaling website that does something like pinterest within a decade, which now can be built in hours.
I'm not just talking about scaffolding and api usage either, so much has changed in coding in the last 15 or so years as well. think object oriented programming, interfaces, and GIT, and other new / useful practices.
the way we store our data is different as well. I believe it was the 70s, but during that time people needed convincing storing data in relational databases was a good thing.
That's not true and even Sussman acknowledges this:
"The fundamental difference is that programming today is all about doing science on the parts you have to work with. That means looking at reams and reams of man pages and determining that POSIX does this thing, but Windows does this other thing, and patching together the disparate parts to make a usable whole.
Beyond that, the world is messier in general. There’s massive amounts of data floating around, and the kinds of problems that we’re trying to solve are much sloppier, and the solutions a lot less discrete than they used to be."
It seems like this is focused a lot on what people want to do, as opposed to what provides value. Not that that's a bad focus! But if you want to predict the future, I think market forces would be a better indicator; as much as we might want to move to a future where programming involves more intuitive tools, I still think it will be more powerful, and thus valuable, to be able to muck around in the code.
"...so why are we having a serious conversation about grooming children to become software developers before they’ve even gone to middle school?"
We're not, really, but given the pervasiveness of computing technology we're recognizing that it's important for children to have some formal experience with software design concepts regardless of which career path they choose.
I'm a firm believer that at least some coding ability is beneficial in any profession. It's like writing, or vocabulary; you don't "need" it for some professions, per se, but being a good writer enhances both your professional and personal life in many ways, so it's worthwhile to teach. It's much the same with coding.
This. Whether or not we need more professional devs is beside the point. At coder dojos, for example, they're not teaching design patterns, they're teaching the basics - assignment, loops, conditionals - the kinds of things that allow you to automate computation in other fields of endeavour
Exactly - teaching people how to use software to solve problems at an early age is not railroading them into a single career path, it's setting them up to be more effective in the career path that they eventually choose.
An administrative assistant who can write scripts to collate and email weekly reports to their boss is far more valuable than one who spends four hours a week combing through excel spreadsheets.
A visual artist who can write their own plugins for Blender/Maya/Photoshop/etc will be much more flexible and productive than one who performs the same 2-minute-long string of commands hundreds of times a day.
A machinist who can quickly design a part in Solidworks and send it to a CNC mill or lathe will be able to serve a wider range of customer needs than one who outsources that design work or crafts the part by hand.
And so on. Why is there so much hostility to the idea of teaching children some basic programming skills at an early age?
"To add an example for clarity, think of the field of typography — until the Digital Age, typography was a specialized occupation. But with new programs like Microsoft Word coming into existence, typography (e.g. formatting a document, setting the margins, making sure the lettering is appealing, etc.) became something everyone could do easily without much thinking."
Without much thinking pretty much encapsulates what Word did to presentation standards, at least in my experience. Let us never forget WordArt.
Part of me always wants to make the argument that these things are difficult, not just because of an abstract syntax and arcane rules, but because these things are genuinely difficult to reason about - attempts to make difficult things easier by papering over the cracks results in a lot of pain for a lot of people. Bits ping off and people are left unable to even begin to solve the problem.
However the very, very, obvious flipside of this is that lowering barriers to entry is pretty much always a good thing. It invites unconventional perspectives and novel approaches - how could that be a bad thing? Sure, some people will make crappy things that shouldn't have ever existed but by the same token some people will make great things that never would have been without the lowered barriers.
> For instance, to turn a button red, we shouldn’t have to write code. We should just be able to point to the button and select a shade of red.
Someone is going to have to right the code so that the end-user can just click buttons.
So if this future of programmatic interfaces is coming, it's going to require more people writing code to build it— not fewer!
"The future I imagine is a world in which programming is self-explanatory, where people talk to computers to build software. To get there, programming tools should first use our language."
But is:
"For every button on the page that is a "warning" button, replace the background color to red."
Yes - it's miles better. If you're unconciously competant (i.e. good at your job) they might seem like they both take about the same cognitive effort to understand.
But think for a beginner:
What is $ ? Is it money?
What are () for?
What is CSS?
I want to shade it, so lets do background-shade .. oh, color only works, so you have to know all the terms.
Can I do "background-color" "red blue white striped"
What is button.warning? Can I do button.border ?
These are all questions a newbie could ask - because they have no experience in the "domain language"
The questions raised was "better," not "easier to learn." In absence of everything else, being easy to learn is a point in favor of natural language--but the inefficiencies, ambiguities, and probable weakness of using natural language are big marks against it. Checkers is easier to learn than chess, but has fewer players.
Inform 7 is a programming language that looks similar to natural English. As far as I can tell the only benefit is tricking beginners into thinking it's easy. By the time they figure out it's a normal programming language only with extra verbose syntax, it's too late, they're already a programmer.
If we had a real natural language based programming language it would have all the problems of law. Laws are written in a very formal style that takes a lot of training to understand, and despite this they contain enough ambiguity to support a whole industry of lawyers arguing about them. Making programming similar to law would not make anything easier.
I used to mess around a bit with Inform 6 (they had a really excellent tutorial[1]). It wasn't great, but since it was basically C-like with some extra DSL stuff sprinkled on top, you could usually figure out what it was doing without too much effort.
I tried to get into Inform 7, but the natural language syntax was so fuzzy, I was constantly trying to figure out how things worked and how I had to write things down to get the results I was trying to get.
EDIT: Since guess-the-verb was sometimes half the battle with old Infocom games, I suppose its ironically fitting that the experience of writing IF with Inform 7 parallels that experience.
I remember going to a mobile conference in the early 2000s and every single vendor there was saying that developing mobile apps using UML was the future. No code, just map out everything in a diagram.
Granted a smart phone was unheard of at this point so most mobile apps wouldn't even be called apps by today's standards.
A decade and a half later and mobile developer is a highly skilled _coding_ position.
in the early 2000s and every single vendor there was saying that developing mobile apps using UML was the future. No code, just map out everything in a diagram.
UML in later versions got so bad that even the original creators disowned it. Turned out that putting everything into a diagram was just as hard (and less convenient) than writing it as code.
I think the author is missing the forest for the trees, here. Schools often don't have much of a computing curriculum, and these classes are great for improving general programming literacy. And if one kid finds out he really enjoys it when he wouldn't normally have through school, that's a win. It's true that most of them won't become programmers, but we don't teach biology in high school assuming you won't become a biologist, either.
Progress happens slow in the short term and fast in the long term.
In the 1980s, there was a consensus that "software components" enabled by object orientation were a pipe dream.
They were so long as you were using C++ which was barely binary compatible and where you couldn't reuse objects in a .so file without also having an .h file. It was awful, not at all a minimal viable product.
Then Java came along and a number of other languages that adopted essentially the same model for OO programming such as Python, PHP, Ruby, C#, etc.
Now you can cut and paste a few lines of XML into Maven and woohoo... You've incorporated a software component into your system.
People bitch that it has to be XML, but the sheer ease of doing so means it is not hard at all to get 100+ dependencies in a project and now the problem is dealing with the problems that come when you have 100+ dependencies.
(And of course the same is true with npm and every other language that has similar tools.)
Two big themes are: (i) tools that reduce the essential difficulty of software development and (ii) antiprofessionalism in software engineering.
Compilers like FORTRAN mean you don't need to have the intimacy with the machine you need to write, say, Macro Assembler. That is mainstream, but other technologies, such as logic programming and rules engine are still stillborn. In theory tools like that mean the order of execution does not matter so much so you don't need the skill to figure out what order to put the instructions in. Practically they are yet to become vernacular tools that are palatable to programmers and non-programmers. (Anything programmers can't stand will be 10x more painful to non-programmers, I can tell you that!)
Anti-professionalism is another big theme. Had computers come around 20 years earlier we would probably have a programmer's union, licensing and other things that would make a big difference in our lives. As it is, the beef that programmers have is not that we don't get paid enough, it is that we are often forced into malpractice by management.
Maybe an unpopular opinion here, but I agree with the article overall.
My view is less that programming is going away, and more that all jobs are. Not immediately or anything, but I don't think we are going to magically produce programming jobs for all the masses who are going to need a job.
Having been at this over 15 years I have single handedly automated thousands of jobs, and of those a healthy handful are making things more efficient that a project needs less programmers, etc..
So while we will still need programmers probably forever , I'm not sure why people think that the number of programming jobs will do anything but stay the same or decrease, while the number of candidates increases.
Tooling has come so far, and it's going to go farther. You don't need to know a lot to make something meaningful anymore.
How we expect to train all children to be programmers and think that by the time they are our age it will still be a field that is lucrative is silly I think. My prediction is with all the new programmers coming into the field intersecting with the tooling getting better, intersecting with that a lot of other markets need less people I think we are left with a crowded field of players where the average skill level is lower because the tasks do not require it to be all that high any more.
Programming is the new carpentry. Probably jobs for a long time , but training the children now like it's going to be the most amazing career path is short sighted I think.
Considering this, I hope my kids don't pick programming as a career. I would love to be wrong.
Programming is the new carpentry. Probably jobs for a long time , but training the children now like it's going to be the most amazing career path is short sighted I think.
Train your children to think. Give them the freedom to change career paths if necessary.
Supporting your opinion the BLS puts the job outlook of a programmer at -8% between 2014 and 2024.
I hold the same opinion as you. I think that new languages and tooling will empower people to do more with less while being easier to learn. Combine this with globalization plus stagnating economies and the outlook of programming as a career seems less lucrative.
"Programming" is the task of making other tasks irrelevant. Thus, if we have all the software we could want, it means there aren't any jobs for anybody, whatever profession they choose.
If it was another company doing this, there might be a chance it is meaningful. Google is not that company, however. They started and killed visual programming projects before, dumping everyone's data. The last one was called App Inventor. At least they made the code open source so MIT could write App Inventor 2 based on it. The best thing they could do to make me think Project Bloks will be meaningful is to give it to another company in a similar fashion. Otherwise I expect they would just kill it next year anyway like other projects of theirs.
Are there graphical languages that advocates like?
The only graphical language that I've encountered professionally is LabVIEW, and I've yet to see an instance/programming style where it has been superior for anything but quick prototyping.
A language that's editable in both flowchart and traditional formats could be very useful, if executed in a way that doesn't cripple the traditional side of things.
LabVIEW was eerily satisfying to write code in. Or at least some type of code in. Loops and logic blocks got a tiny bit weird, but overall you could do a lot with sub-vis.
LabVIEW gets really weird once you get to things like loops or, even worse, threading. You will start craving some good old fashioned code very quickly.
I haven't seen any kind of visual coding environment that didn't fall apart quickly once you got to more complex scenarios.
I have an artist friend who does everything in Max/MSP. At first I was rather dismissive and thought he should just learn to code properly - but the patching environment makes him able to get results incredibly fast - much much faster than I can do with C++ (even using something like Openframeworks)
A designer/fabricator friend developes a CNC CAM system in Grasshopper for Rhino, probably faster than I could in code.
It is node-based, but more importantly changes can be made live, and with a 3d-engine available preview/visualization/debugging
Natural language sucks, it is amibigious, difficult to manipulate, verbose, and have too many non-functional degrees of freedom. After all, that's why mathematics left natural language and adopted the mathematical syntax we have today.
Diagrams suck, they are ambigious, difficult to manipulate, verbose, and has too many non-functional degrees of freedom. That's why cook books don't have diagrams to describe recipies.
The syntax will never die, it is the only sensible we have to define programs.
I'm going to disagree on that. Every day I wish I could intermix textual and pictorial representations of logic in the programming I do. In particular, any series of computations that can be represented as a directed graph, e.g. a streaming data workflow, or state machine, is much more easily understood pictorially than textually.
The flowchart and decision tree exist for a reason to describe algorithms.
> In particular, any series of computations that can be represented as a directed graph, e.g. a streaming data workflow, or state machine, is much more easily understood pictorially than textually.
As long as it is very simple. Electronics already have a highly developed visual language for describing their functions - but if what was going on inside every chip was illustrated just as what was going on between chips, it would be entirely unintelligible. Instead, any visual representation is at a particular scale, and well known portions are represented as blocks with cryptic textual notes next to each interface (ACK, EN, V0+, CLK, PT2, HVSD, WTFBBQ, etc.), labels to identify company or type, and an expectation that you know what they do or can find out on your own (and not an expectation that you understand how they do it.)
Anything simple enough to be completely expressed in human-comprehensible pictures should be exposed to the user and modifiable (even if not by using pictures, but forms.) I totally agree, if that's what you and this article are trying to say. My experiences in trying to encode actual human workflows in BPMN have taught me that when using pictures it's harder to express things of any sophistication than in words - because of words like "with" and "each" and "all", "if" and "when," and because of ways things change over time, and because of separate but overlapping/interacting flows that languages can express easily but pictures not so much.
In pictures, that involves looking all over your picture for different things, trying to figure out how to draw lines to them; if the condition is once or twice removed from the object of the search, it involves trying to untangle massive knots with your eyes and memory.
Theoretically, that is. What it involves in practice is scrawling words all over your picture (just like in a circuit diagram.) Words that express the same types of relationships over time and type as the picture is trying to express projected onto a plane, words that could be easily expanded to include those relationships and eliminate the 18 types of lines, the 25 types of shapes, the 12 types of shape borders, the 16 color schemes and the long list of rules for connecting them that had to be invented to avoid coming up with a textual syntax.
Yes, and that's how I would use a language that would allow mixed picture and text logic flows. At a certain level of abstraction block diagrams greatly assist understanding program flow, and it is redundant that I have to write the code and then draw the block diagram later for documentation.
Going back to electronics, I don't think anyone would argue that schematic block diagrams are inferior to reading the raw netlist. Similarly, I feel programming could be improved if IDEs for popular langauges would allow connecting functions together in a streaming manner. Of course, I am aware this exists, Simulink, LabView, FPGA schematic workflow, but these are niche languages that I don't work in.
"I don't think anyone would argue that schematic block diagrams are inferior to reading the raw netlist."
Well, no, but some may well argue that reading the HDL is better then a diagram. I have experience working with both the HDL and schematic in the FPGA world, and in my estimation text-based HDL is way better than working with a diagram.
Of course, YMMV, my brain may just be more optimized for processing text instead of images.
Many times I wished there was a HDL for PCB design input instead of schematic tools, now that there is often very little discrete/analog parts in a board, because large chips include almost everything needed and you mainly spend time connecting them together, possibly with a bit of plumbing but not much, and the only remaining discrete components are very repetitive: a ton of similar decoupling capacitors, pull-up/down resistors, termination resistors, a couple of voltage divider resistors and a few other common functions.
That should be a great fit for a textual HDL instead of labouring through a schematics mainly linking pins to pins again and again. It would even be much more expressive, now that we often have chips so big that they cannot be represented efficiently as a single symbol on a single sheet but are split in smaller blocks looking like HDL ports without the flexibility; now that µC, SoC and other kinds of chips have pins that are so much muxed out that they don't have a clear, expressible function, meaning that grouping them in blocks is more of random choice than a good solution. And this multiplexing means that you'll often have to change and change again the connections of your wires in the schematic, and that would be much easier to do with an HDL.
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That's why my mind was blown when a software job forced me to use a graphical tool like Scade. It felt like coming 20 years backwards, when in electronics HDL were not popular yet and we had to design FPGAs and such with schematics. And that was even worse, because the graphical representation looks parallel, concurrent, as a electronic schematic does, except that it doesn't match anything on the software side: first the specification/design document you have to implement is generally sequential, not concurrent, and then the generated code and the way the CPU/computer works are sequential as well, not concurrent. So you have this weird looking graphical part in the middle, which looks parallel but isn't really, and messes with your brain because you have to perpetually translate between the sequential specification to it, and from it to what it really does sequentially.
An appaling moment to do this job and discover that they considered it an improvement on C/Ada/whatever regular programming. And I didn't mention the tooling; like when what could have been a simple textual diff turns into an epic nightmare you are never sure you can trust the result, if you manage to get a result.
> I'm going to disagree on that. Every day I wish I could intermix textual and pictorial representations of logic in the programming I do. In particular, any series of computations that can be represented as a directed graph, e.g. a streaming data workflow, or state machine, is much more easily understood pictorially than textually.
I've done this. It doesn't work. You need more details than can be cleanly represented on a diagram. How do you do namespacing for example? Which database schema will that box connect to? How will it reconnect?
All 'visual programming languages' fall back to text boxes constantly. Inevitably the contents of those text boxes are needed to understand or execute the visual representation of the program.
Sure, the contents of the text box is necessary. But treating the contents as a black box is not something new, and I don't see it as a problem. That's pretty much every function call ever - all I'm interested in is the calling signature. A combination of pictures and text would suit me far better than what we have today, which is text everywhere, and diagrams / flowcharts afterwards if you get around to writing documentation.
-on mobile so I apologize in advance for bad grammar and typos
I don't think the author understands the purpose of the project. Google wants more coders. As a company Coders are likely one of Google's largest expense (At my Job staffing is 25% developers, and staffing is ~80% of our current budget).
Does Google necessarily need more developers writing code? No, however they could use more people who can code to solve the small problems they face daily.
I think it's more likely we'll have people writing code informally, and as a small part of their overall job.
>Writing code will become less and less necessary, making software development more accessible to everyone.
I agree with that sentiment, however I fail to see the link between more accessible development and fewer people writing code. This process has been happening for years.
>The real benefit of something like Project Bloks is that it actually removes the code.
But is that new? What if something more advanced is needed?
Excel is a good example of writing code for a job. Access is an example of programming without writing code (it's sql with a GUI). Both tools are popular however people have a hard time doing advanced things. This is also perhaps due to the high price of creating the building block interface/software cost.
By thinking logically, people may not write code formally, they may not write any code: however it will encourage people to create solutions to the problems most applicable to them.
Maybe their solution is 90% the blocks provided by their program. 10% code they wrote so handle their edge case. Perhaps it's something they only engage in one day a month.
In the end I think we'll see more code, more people writing code, and programs with more handling of the common tasks as building blocks but the ability to write code for the complex parts and plug it in where needed.
As someone that has had several times now to "productionize" or "modernize" an Excel spreadsheet or Access database many times, this is one of those prognostications this is one of those things people think from time to time and thus far in my experience tend to be incorrect about.
The issue with "computational thinking" in so far as how this article seems to want to teach it and how most schools often do teach it already in the real world is the tendency to stop at the basics and Office applications and just enough VBA/macros to give people a feeling of competency without giving them a glimpse into the real depths of programming and what software developers really do.
I keep wanting to make a XKCD-style sketch graph of the idea. But there's a lot of Dunning-Kruger over-competent business people that thinks all the software they need to run their business is spreadsheets and spreadsheets pretending to be databases like Access. To them real software developers seem over-paid based on their experience of Lovecraftian "systems" they can hack together given what they think they know.
That's a very real and dangerous place for business people to be, but it is unsurprisingly common. Those people don't respect programming as a discipline and a craft, and sometimes those are the people out in the corporate world controlling software developer salaries or morale...
It's also the same lack of knowledge about software as a craft (as engineering, in a very classical sense) that leads people time and time again to the well of "well in the future people won't be coding because [ Excel will do it all | There will be a visual tool everyone will easily understand | AI will do all the programming based on natural language queries | Insert some other magic idea here ]".
There's as much art to software development as there is science, and forgetting that art will still need artists and will not make itself is a strange thing that is surprising common.
To be fair, there are a lot of software developers themselves that have played into this delusion, and it's something of a trap that a software developer can easily fall into. We're trained to break down systems and try to automate them to their fullest potential and it's hard sometimes to avoid that meta-leap to wanting to do it to our own systems. We fall into building "Business Rules Engines" that we think some business users might be able to understand and comprehend and might obfuscate away the need for programming. We experiment with boondoggles like visual programming languages and "auto-coding" experiences. We get grandiose visions of the machine or software product or great AI that will make it all more accessible...
The future will probably look like the present in that regard. We'll still have the Dunning-Kruger folks building mission critical applications out of complex webs of Excel and Access and other past and future productivity tools we build in the goal of making programming more accessible. We'll still have software developers eventually hired to clean up the messes and craft versions that can sustainably last or reliably operate outside the hacked together environment from which they were originally built. There will continue to be software developers continuing to think they can build the environment that will done rule them all and save everyone time (and meanwhile eat up so much of software development budgets and time to built it)... And all of these groups will still have a hard time communicating between each other the real risks and efforts involved in any of it.
Well, I disagree. When I started to program, in 2000, it was só easy that a child 12 years old could do (HTML,php,ftp). Although anyone can deploy something online today, I doubt it's só easy for a 12 years old kid to learn something similar to what I used, like React, node and git.
Editado: conclusion, programming is becoming harder, not easier.
This article strokes me the wrong way. If any of the things described in there were possible, why the hell would I be writing any code? I'm a lazy programmer for gods sake, and code I don't have to write is a win in my book.
Matter of fact, once I got past the point where the novelty of writing lots of code wore off, I'm spending most of my time trying to write less code.
That side step all these miracle solutions for bringing coding to the masses in one fell swoop and eliminating its tedium do is that "Hey, technically, if you draw pictures instead, it doesn't count as writing". Yes, technically true, totally useless. I personally believe that whoever comes up with this again and again deserves to be bludgeoned by a copy of "K&R The C Programming language", turned into a picture book. All 70,000 pages of of it, with the big glossy full-page, double-page foldout prints.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 291 ms ] threadProgramming is definitely going to get easier and I don't doubt that it will become a common skill.
I just doubt this idea that professional programming is a dying art or something. It is just silly to say that because tools that lower the barrier of entry are becoming more common, that the entire profession will soon be dead.
(Also, I am like 75% sure that it was a sponsored article to advertise for the company named in the article)
> It is just silly to say that because tools that lower the barrier of entry are becoming more common, that the entire profession will soon be dead.
Is actually due to Labor Supply vs. Labor Demand. I can envision a world where majority of jobs are all replaced by machines (from Baristas to Accountants), and web/software development (among other fields, such as specialized medicine) are some of the last places for people to remain self-sufficient off their own labor. With this over-abundance of supply, employers are capable of being extremely discretionary over their hires, and are able to pay just enough for their human capital to sustain themselves.
I think the problem with that assumption is that there has been virtually no traction on "just telling the computer what to do" - whether text or voice. There is also the assumption that programming is not getting more difficult. While not everyone is working on "capital E" engineering efforts, it's a bit ridiculous to think that our jobs are getting easier to automate in the wake of Internet of Things, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and projects like Web Assembly pushing browser-based development into interesting, new places.
Just because we made it easy to set up a blog doesn't mean we made it easy to "program with words".
The future is most professionals writing code as part of their job, just as the present is most professionals writing as part of their job.
We've had that for over twenty years.
My guess is because with working with text is more efficient. The cognitive load of finding a setting in the UI, moving your mouse to it, and selecting the value is far greater than just typing.
Visual Studio and many others have this out of the box but there's plenty of companies that do well selling exactly this like telerik.
I personally don't and been doing it the "hard way" since the beginning because it feels less confining. And I don't want to rely on an IDE to build something. Plus the code it generates was always kind of kludgy.
Perhaps, in part, because one allows for a greater expressiveness -- albeit with a little more planning and cognitive load.
Visual editors don't work so well with pages where parts are static & parts are dynamically generated. (Like, a css class may be different based on the data that it's showing). And at this point, pretty much every page in a web app has dynamic parts.
I think python strikes a good balance, naturalish language whenever possible, without forcing it into places where it doesn't fit. At least that's the feel I got from it.
I just showed it to my girlfriend who is learning Python. Her comment was "hmm but is this really easier than learning to code"? Well, it probably IS a lot easier, as long as your app fits within the constraints of what Bubble can do.
The problem with such tools is always that you very quickly hit the limits of what they can do, and then you're stuck. You can't easily peel back the abstraction and go deeper. You end up having to scrap the project or just give up on certain things. Bubble's "language" can't do looping, for instance. You can apparently write snippets of Javascript to do other stuff, but then you're back to needing to learn programming again.
Cobol had that idea, and Applescript took it farther. For example:
It starts to get unwieldy because there are so many parts of speech, and remembering them all and how they fit is a pain. Some people call Applescript a "read only" language because of this."Looking like a natural language" doesn't make the language easier to use, at least until we have AI compilers.
Dear writer, let me introduce you to FORTRAN, COBOL, LISP, or BASIC. These are alive languages, all 50+ years old.
Coding didn't change much. The languages, the methodologies, the ideas change, but the approach is the same, and whoever thinks this will soon (50 years is not _that_ far) changes, have never had to debug something nasty. Doing that with voice commands in my opinion is significantly harder compared to what we have now.
We will have tools, accessible, easy tools; Arduinos and Pis of the future; sure. But it will not replace, nor eliminate or reduce the amount of code written.
I found a lot of ideas in this article to be pretty interesting: http://worrydream.com/#!/LearnableProgramming
(And even just looking at languages, Fortran 2008 is hardly recognizable as compared to FORTRAN IV)
You could have automations around that though. A lot of manual work could be replaced with little AI bots that do the work. And since this work is not really "creative", it could be done through AI.
I think something eventually will, though. My reasoning for this conclusion is simply that I don't believe a significantly larger percentage of people will learn to write production software than are able to do so now. At the same time the need for software in every sector continues to grow, leading to some varying levels of scarcity in programmers. That's a massive economic opportunity, and so people will continue to pound at that nut until it cracks.
But if we create an AI that can understand people well enough to know what those people want without clear instructions, yes, we will have placed us out of the job market, together with everybody else.
Blueprints don't change as much as software does. It's not generally interesting to diff, fork, reformat, or patch a blueprint.
It is not about how much more information can we convey, but how much less data must be expended to present a tractable model of reality to the human operator. Conveying more details is worse than useless, it results in informationi overload and cognitive stagnation.
Historically, the way it happened in computer programming is those tools are text based. This is as much about the early use of computers as clerical aids to process business data, and the early synergies between computation and linguistics. Maybe it can be done, but it will require millions of man hours to accomplish. And almost nobody wants to invest in doing so because of the cost of opportunity.
If, on the other hand, you cannot ever be 100% sure that fixing one stop light in Brooklyn will cause a bunch sewage lines to flush out to the street in Long Island, then zooming does more harm than good. At the end of day, you need the map to conform to the realities of the territory. If that gets in the way of that pretty abstraction of yours, then the abstraction - not reality - is wrong. And when that is the case, you need to start over and make a better map.
Text based toolchains are, for all their limitations, a (sufficiently) reality conformant map. It does not mean there cannot be others; but as of today I do not know about any suitable candidate.
But the drawing wasn't the source of stress, rather it was the project "specification" that he sweated. The issue was the spec was a legal, text-format document detailing the size of beams, type of wire, plumbing, fixtures, etc. He had to assure that beams were sufficient to support structure, electrical wiring was safe and up to code, etc. A mistake could expose the contractor and himself to legal liability if a component failed, so an accurate spec was a task he took seriously.
Of course the subject of program specifications is commonly discussed, though often doesn't have the same significance that my father experienced. I guess in most cases program crashes don't have the same impact that a roof caving in would entail. In situations where crashing can't be tolerated, the spec will mean a whole lot more.
Your info was relevant to the idea of that at some level of complexity it becomes necessary to use text vs. only graphic presentation. Maybe in construction that occurs when there are more than a few elevations to juggle, but you probably know much more about it than me.
I thoroughly hated LabView when I had to program in it, but it did convince me that a graphical programming language could work -- if only it refrained from doing the cking stupid things that LabView did (such as the strongly typed editor* that would automatically progate the any type error it found, but not your fixes).
In my current C++ work, I would dealy love a graphical tool that showed me where any given value came from, much like LabView does by its very nature.
That's funny. I came away with the opposite opinion. Text is much better at describing details and it's much easier to be consumed by various things: people, editors, analysis tools, web apps, test engines, code generators, code transformation tools, ... I could go on.
Languages like LabView never have a complete toolchain (Prove me wrong by posting a small piece of editable LabView in a reply to this HN comment). They work well as domain specific languages, but that's about it.
My understanding is linguistics research has pretty thoroughly debunked this idea.
Don't remember the experimental design (was a long time ago, sorry), but I believe a study showed Chinese readers basically translate the characters back into the sounds of spoken language in their heads, before any processing of meaning takes place. In other words, pictographic mnemonics may be helpful when first learning the characters, but play no role for a fluent reader.
I suspect a similar thing will be true with programming for a long time to come. Even if you try to replace keyboard characters with other icons, it will be just substituting one arbitrary association between symbols and meaning with another. (Which is basically what language boils down to, anyway.)
Based on these two sentences, I'm confident that you don't know the first thing about Chinese characters or Egyptian hieroglyphics.
I kid.
Yes, in that the tools are massively better. So is the hardware that it all runs on.
No, in that you still have to tell the computer precisely and unambiguously exactly what you want it to do, and how, mostly in text. The level of detail required today is somewhat less, due to better tools, but at a high level the work hasn't changed.
1) There's a massive reliance on reusable libraries these days. Don't get me wrong, this is a good thing, but it means people spend less time rewriting the "boring" stuff (for want a lazy description) and more time wring their program logic.
2) Most people are coding in languages and/or language features that are several abstractions higher than they were 50 years ago. Even putting aside web development - which is probably one of the widest used frameworks these days - modern languages and even modern standards of old languages have templates, complex object systems, and all sorts of other advanced features that a compiler needs to convert into a runtime stack. Comparatively very few people write code that directly maps as closely to hardware as they did 50 years ago.
3) And expanding on my former point, a great many languages these days compile to their own runtime environment (as per the de facto standard language compiler): Java, Javascript, Python, Scala, Perl, PHP, Ruby, etc. You just couldn't do that on old hardware.
4) Multi-threaded / concurrency programming is also a big area people write code in that didn't exist 50 years ago. Whether that's writing POSIX threads in C, using runtime concurrency in languages like Go (goprocesses) which don't map directly to OS threads, or even clustering across multiple servers using whatever libraries you prefer for distributed processing, none of this was available in the 60s when servers were a monolithic commodity and CPUs were single core. Hence why time sharing on servers was expensive and why many programmers used write their code out by hand before giving it to operators to punch once computing times was allocated.
So while you're right that we still write statements instructing the computer, that's essentially the minimum you'd expect to do. Even in Star Trek with the voice operated computers, it's users are commanding the computer with a series of statements. One could argue that is a highly intuitive REPL environment which mostly fits your "you still have to tell the computer precisely and unambiguously exactly what you want it to do..." statement yet is worlds apart from the they we program today.
Expanding on your above quote, "mostly in text": even that is such a broad generalisation that it overlooks quite a few interesting edge cases that didn't exist 50 years ago:
1) web development with GUI based tools (I some people will argue that web development isn't "proper" programming, but it is one of the biggest areas in which people write computer code these days. So it can't really be ignored. And there are a lot of GUI tools that write a lot of that code for the developer / designer. Granted hand crafted code is almost always better, but fact remains they still exist.
2) GUI mock ups with application-orientated IDEs. I'm talking about Visual Basic, QtCreator, Android Studio, etc where you can mock up the design of the UI in the IDE using drawing tools rather than writing creating the UI objects manually in code.
3) GUI based programming languages (eg Scratch). Granted these are usually aimed as teaching languages, but they're still an interesting alternative to the "in text" style programming languages. There's also an esoteric language which you program with coloured pixels.
So your generalisation is accurate, but perhaps not fair given the number of exceptions
Lastly: "The level of detail required today is somewhat less, due to better tools, but at a high level the work hasn't changed.":
The problem with taking things to that high level is it then becomes comparable with any instruction-based field. For example, cook books have a lis...
Programming languages exist today because computers can't handle ambiguity and don't understand software design. In another 50 years, machines will be a lot smarter, more able to handle ambiguity, and better than people at designing workflows and catching potential errors. Like the horse, no doubt some people will still prefer to do things the old way, but there's a good chance this will be limited mostly to academic exercises.
All they're saying here is that the tools we have will progress a lot in the next 50 years. There are some obvious problems with the way we design software right now which are due to human limitations. The only way to fix those is to remove a lot of direct control from humans and give it to AI programmers. Manually writing JavaScript in 2066 will be like manually carving arrowheads today: still effective but not something you would do for a serious purpose.
In 50 years, 99%+ of all the work ever done by civilization will be done after 2016.
> we know that we can create tools that translate designs into executable code that can be less error-prone and more reliable than people typing letters into a text editor.
I disagree. Maybe you know, but I haven't seen any indication of the sort.
http://shaffner.us/cs/papers/tarpit.pdf
There has already been some significant progress on this front. E.g., SQL and logic programming let you describe what you want to happen, and let the computer figure out some of the details. Any compiler worth using does this, too. Smarter machines and smarter programs will mean smarter programming languages.
Creating clear and accurate design documents is so much harder and more specialized a skill than programming that many places that do programming either avoid it entirely or make a pro-forma gesture (often after-the-fact) in its direction.
(I am only about half-kidding on the reasoning, and not at all about the effect.)
This is exactly what programmers do today. We just call the "design document" a "program".
Over time, our design documents become higher and higher level, with the programmer having to specify fewer details and leaving more of the work of sorting out the actual details to the computer.
Yeah and it took "us" 60 years from discovering flight to landing a rocket on the moon. Took "us" 60 years from the first computer to globally-live video streaming in your pocket. Time is a pointless metric when it comes to technology. You don't know what someone is cooking up down in some basement somewhere that will be released tomorrow and shatter your concept of reality.
Be really hard to identify, though.
Speaking as someone who has studied cuneiform and Akkadian, I would say that this claim isn't true. Here's a vowel that predates the period that you mentioned[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_(cuneiform)
Where did you get this idea? Babylonian writing fully indicated the vowels. It always has. You're thinking of Egyptian / Hebrew / Arabic writing.
Even where a semitic language was written in cuneiform, vowels were always indicated, because the cuneiform system didn't offer you the option to leave them out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_language#Vowels
(Old Persian was written in repurposed cuneiform, and therefore could have omitted the vowels, but didn't.)
And that computing horsepower mostly goes towards fuel efficiency and safety. Which is nice, but almost certainly not the kind of progress people in the 1960's thought we'd make in automobiles over 50+ years.
> traditional pilots being essentially babysitters for autopilot systems
The first autopilot takeoff/cruise/landing happened in 1947.
> hyperloop designs
But we don't have hyperloops.
> I'd say those are much bigger changes than 1936-1986.
By 1986 we had fully-digital fly-by-wire aircraft. Our big achievement since then has been about a 20% improvement in fuel efficiency.
To bring your comparison closer to the subject at hand, this article has nothing to do with the design of computers themselves. We could use the same basic Von Neumann architecture in 50 years and still get rid of traditional programming languages as a primary method of designing software, just like we use the same basic engine designs from 50 years ago but use entirely different methods of designing and controlling them now.
Take an engineer designing a jet in 1966 and put them with a 2016 team. They will have to learn an entirely different workflow. Now computers are heavily involved in the design process and most of what was done manually by engineers is now written into software. The same situation will happen 50 years from now for people who design software.
Take an extreme example like game creation. In 1966, you could make a computer game, but you were doing manual calculations and using punch cards. Now you download Unity and almost everything but the art design and game logic is done for you. Game design moved quickly toward these kinds of automated systems because they tend to have highly reusable parts and rely mostly on art and story for what separates them from the competition. But there's no reason why this same concept wouldn't apply to tools used for any kind of program.
The horse to car comparison was only meant to show that the development of a technology in the first 50 years (or any arbitrary number) will not necessarily look like the next 50 years. Well-established tools quickly fall out of use when a disruptive technology has reached maturity, even if that tool has been used for thousands of years. Right now, software design is difficult, buggy, and causes constant failures and frustrations. Once we have established and recorded best practices that can be automated instead of manually remaking them every time, there will be no need for manual coding in traditional programming languages. Machines are getting much better at understanding intent, and this will be built into all software design.
Send them to the "PCs for seniors" course at the local library to learn the basics of clicking around on a computer. Then a one or two week training course on whatever software is used to design planes these days.
Getting up to date on modern "workflow" is not going to be a major hurdle for someone smart enough to design a jet. Heck, it's very likely there could be someone who started designed jets in 1966 and still designs them today. (Post retirement consultancy.)
Yes, Unity helps to visually organize your game's data, and there are built in and downloadable components (which are all created by coders) that can be used to plug into your game, but it's just another set of abstractions. Most of the time you will be writing your own components in a traditional coding language or delving into other's component code to adapt it to actually make your game function. There ARE game creation systems intended for no coding required, but they come with the expected limitations of visual coding that people are bringing up in this thread. No, Unity doesn't really fall into this category, barring a few limited game domains.
Perhaps in 50 years every domain will be "mapped" in this way, with predefined components that work with each other and can be tweaked as needed, but I don't see how that could eliminate coding, or even displace it that much. Two reasons I think coding is here to stay:
1) Any sufficiently complex system needs it's organization to be managed. At a certain complexity, whatever system is replacing coding will become something that looks a lot like coding. At that level of complexity, text is easier to manage than a visual metaphor. 2) Most pieces of software need custom components, even if only to stand out. Those game creation systems with no coding? No one is impressed by the games that are created in those systems. Not because the system cannot produce something worthwhile - but because with everything looking the same, the value of that output drops substantially.
I think coding will only go away when programming does. When the computer is as intelligent and creative as we are. And that's a point which I do not want think about too much.
This like the shift in transportation. A lot of people love driving and mistrust autonomous vehicles. But the tech is almost to the point where it's safer than human drivers. In most situations, it already is.
Another comparison would be SaaS. For a lot of companies, it's about risk mitigation. Moving responsibilities away from internal staff makes business sense in many cases.
This is a criticism of the idea that we need to make coding a basic life skill that everyone should focus on. It looks a lot like denial to some people.
Let's go back to transportation. Imagine if people were pushing the idea that commercial driving needs to be in every high school because driving was such a big employment area. Some people might say that the autonomous vehicles look like a big threat to job prospects, so maybe it's not such a good idea to focus on those particular skills.
Coding is great, provides a lot of opportunities to the people that it attracts, but it's a pretty specialized skill that's going to be increasingly displaced by more natural and automatic interfaces this century in all likelihood.
Cars now go 100,000 miles between tune-ups. They used to go, what? 10,000 miles?
Cars are much safer in collisions than they used to be.
Most cars now have air conditioners. I've driven in a car without AC in Arizona in July; believe me, AC can be a really big deal.
Most cars now have automatic transmissions, power steering, and power brakes.
And cars get much better fuel economy.
Driving from NYC to LA takes less time due to interstates and higher road speeds (and cars that can comfortably handle those speeds). Not half the time, but still a significant improvement.
And yet, most cars are not dramatically different as far as the experience of driving them is concerned. Nothing in the last 50 years looks revolutionary. It's been an accumulation of improvements, but there has been no game changer.
I suspect that the next 50 years in computing will be similar.
I'm curious what your definition of tune-up is, because I don't believe there exists a car that can go that far unmaintained without doing lasting damage to various systems.
After a quick Google, my impression is that most 2016 cars have a first maintenance schedule around 5k-6k miles. Some as low as 3,750.
For even lower maintenance look at electric cars. I think Tesla has very very low maintenance requirements for the first years.
It's not.
I have a couple of 60s Mustangs and several newer cars. My original '65 needs ignition service (what most people call a "tune up") every couple of years (of very modest usage). My '66, converted to electronic ignition, gets about twice as long (and 10x as many miles) before needing ignition service. They both end up fouling plugs because of the terrible mixture control and distribution inherent in their carbureted designs.
My wife's 2005 Honda CR-V gets about 100K to a set of plugs. (Fuel injection, closed loop mixture control, and electronic ignition are the key enhancements that enable this long a time between tune-ups.)
My diesel Mercedes and Nissan LEAF obviously never get tune ups.
You don't do valve adjustments on the Mercedes?
About the only thing I've done abnormal on the car in 7 years is replace two glow plugs. (And when the second one went, I actually replaced the 5 that hadn't been changed yet, since they are cheap and I didn't want to take the manifold off again to change #3...)
This is particularly true, e.g., of How to Design Programs [0].
[0] http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/
You can't beat written word. Corps are not lining up to rewrite their bylaws in a bunch of connected drag-and-droppable blocks. I really don't think it's just inertia, the preciseness, versatility,and ease of examination and editing, and permanence of written language is hard to beat. Same with source code.
1) road signs, which are predominantly graphic based
2) public information signs. Eg no smoking. Also usually picture based albeit does often contain text instruction as well
3) beach flags indicating where to swim etc.
All of these are enforcing by-laws yet none specifically text driven. In fact when conveying simple rules to people, it often makes more sense to explain that in meaningful images as that enables anyone to understand the message, even if one doesn't understand the written language (eg tourists).
However, the original specification, which in the case of the signs are laws and for software is code, is text, not in visuals. There in lies the difference. I think visual aids like dependency graphs will help us visualize code and communicate ideas like in the signs you mention, but due to the reasons I mentioned previously text will still be the preferred method for specification, or in software engineering, programming. For example, visuals only go so far. The best visual specifications I can think of are blueprints, which I'd argue still require a little of reading to understand. But in certain domains, as I said, text is a better medium.
50 years ago, it might be conceivable to build auto scaling website that does something like pinterest within a decade, which now can be built in hours.
I'm not just talking about scaffolding and api usage either, so much has changed in coding in the last 15 or so years as well. think object oriented programming, interfaces, and GIT, and other new / useful practices.
the way we store our data is different as well. I believe it was the 70s, but during that time people needed convincing storing data in relational databases was a good thing.
today even that is changing
That's not true and even Sussman acknowledges this:
"The fundamental difference is that programming today is all about doing science on the parts you have to work with. That means looking at reams and reams of man pages and determining that POSIX does this thing, but Windows does this other thing, and patching together the disparate parts to make a usable whole.
Beyond that, the world is messier in general. There’s massive amounts of data floating around, and the kinds of problems that we’re trying to solve are much sloppier, and the solutions a lot less discrete than they used to be."
We're not, really, but given the pervasiveness of computing technology we're recognizing that it's important for children to have some formal experience with software design concepts regardless of which career path they choose.
I'm a firm believer that at least some coding ability is beneficial in any profession. It's like writing, or vocabulary; you don't "need" it for some professions, per se, but being a good writer enhances both your professional and personal life in many ways, so it's worthwhile to teach. It's much the same with coding.
An administrative assistant who can write scripts to collate and email weekly reports to their boss is far more valuable than one who spends four hours a week combing through excel spreadsheets.
A visual artist who can write their own plugins for Blender/Maya/Photoshop/etc will be much more flexible and productive than one who performs the same 2-minute-long string of commands hundreds of times a day.
A machinist who can quickly design a part in Solidworks and send it to a CNC mill or lathe will be able to serve a wider range of customer needs than one who outsources that design work or crafts the part by hand.
And so on. Why is there so much hostility to the idea of teaching children some basic programming skills at an early age?
Without much thinking pretty much encapsulates what Word did to presentation standards, at least in my experience. Let us never forget WordArt.
Part of me always wants to make the argument that these things are difficult, not just because of an abstract syntax and arcane rules, but because these things are genuinely difficult to reason about - attempts to make difficult things easier by papering over the cracks results in a lot of pain for a lot of people. Bits ping off and people are left unable to even begin to solve the problem.
However the very, very, obvious flipside of this is that lowering barriers to entry is pretty much always a good thing. It invites unconventional perspectives and novel approaches - how could that be a bad thing? Sure, some people will make crappy things that shouldn't have ever existed but by the same token some people will make great things that never would have been without the lowered barriers.
Someone is going to have to right the code so that the end-user can just click buttons. So if this future of programmatic interfaces is coming, it's going to require more people writing code to build it— not fewer!
I don't think the author or the person interviewed has used Visual Basic, or understands why a developer might not want that.
But is: "For every button on the page that is a "warning" button, replace the background color to red."
Necessarily better than? $("button.warning").css("background-color", "red")
But think for a beginner:
What is $ ? Is it money?
What are () for?
What is CSS?
I want to shade it, so lets do background-shade .. oh, color only works, so you have to know all the terms.
Can I do "background-color" "red blue white striped"
What is button.warning? Can I do button.border ?
These are all questions a newbie could ask - because they have no experience in the "domain language"
If we had a real natural language based programming language it would have all the problems of law. Laws are written in a very formal style that takes a lot of training to understand, and despite this they contain enough ambiguity to support a whole industry of lawyers arguing about them. Making programming similar to law would not make anything easier.
I tried to get into Inform 7, but the natural language syntax was so fuzzy, I was constantly trying to figure out how things worked and how I had to write things down to get the results I was trying to get.
EDIT: Since guess-the-verb was sometimes half the battle with old Infocom games, I suppose its ironically fitting that the experience of writing IF with Inform 7 parallels that experience.
[1] http://inform-fiction.org/manual/about_ibg.html
Granted a smart phone was unheard of at this point so most mobile apps wouldn't even be called apps by today's standards.
A decade and a half later and mobile developer is a highly skilled _coding_ position.
UML in later versions got so bad that even the original creators disowned it. Turned out that putting everything into a diagram was just as hard (and less convenient) than writing it as code.
In the 1980s, there was a consensus that "software components" enabled by object orientation were a pipe dream.
They were so long as you were using C++ which was barely binary compatible and where you couldn't reuse objects in a .so file without also having an .h file. It was awful, not at all a minimal viable product.
Then Java came along and a number of other languages that adopted essentially the same model for OO programming such as Python, PHP, Ruby, C#, etc.
Now you can cut and paste a few lines of XML into Maven and woohoo... You've incorporated a software component into your system.
People bitch that it has to be XML, but the sheer ease of doing so means it is not hard at all to get 100+ dependencies in a project and now the problem is dealing with the problems that come when you have 100+ dependencies.
(And of course the same is true with npm and every other language that has similar tools.)
Two big themes are: (i) tools that reduce the essential difficulty of software development and (ii) antiprofessionalism in software engineering.
Compilers like FORTRAN mean you don't need to have the intimacy with the machine you need to write, say, Macro Assembler. That is mainstream, but other technologies, such as logic programming and rules engine are still stillborn. In theory tools like that mean the order of execution does not matter so much so you don't need the skill to figure out what order to put the instructions in. Practically they are yet to become vernacular tools that are palatable to programmers and non-programmers. (Anything programmers can't stand will be 10x more painful to non-programmers, I can tell you that!)
Anti-professionalism is another big theme. Had computers come around 20 years earlier we would probably have a programmer's union, licensing and other things that would make a big difference in our lives. As it is, the beef that programmers have is not that we don't get paid enough, it is that we are often forced into malpractice by management.
My view is less that programming is going away, and more that all jobs are. Not immediately or anything, but I don't think we are going to magically produce programming jobs for all the masses who are going to need a job.
Having been at this over 15 years I have single handedly automated thousands of jobs, and of those a healthy handful are making things more efficient that a project needs less programmers, etc..
So while we will still need programmers probably forever , I'm not sure why people think that the number of programming jobs will do anything but stay the same or decrease, while the number of candidates increases.
Tooling has come so far, and it's going to go farther. You don't need to know a lot to make something meaningful anymore.
How we expect to train all children to be programmers and think that by the time they are our age it will still be a field that is lucrative is silly I think. My prediction is with all the new programmers coming into the field intersecting with the tooling getting better, intersecting with that a lot of other markets need less people I think we are left with a crowded field of players where the average skill level is lower because the tasks do not require it to be all that high any more.
Programming is the new carpentry. Probably jobs for a long time , but training the children now like it's going to be the most amazing career path is short sighted I think.
Considering this, I hope my kids don't pick programming as a career. I would love to be wrong.
Train your children to think. Give them the freedom to change career paths if necessary.
I hold the same opinion as you. I think that new languages and tooling will empower people to do more with less while being easier to learn. Combine this with globalization plus stagnating economies and the outlook of programming as a career seems less lucrative.
But I guess the main point of the article was not that, but the Bubble plug.
The only graphical language that I've encountered professionally is LabVIEW, and I've yet to see an instance/programming style where it has been superior for anything but quick prototyping.
A language that's editable in both flowchart and traditional formats could be very useful, if executed in a way that doesn't cripple the traditional side of things.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_%28programming_languag...
I find myself craving it even 15 years later.
I haven't seen any kind of visual coding environment that didn't fall apart quickly once you got to more complex scenarios.
Natural language sucks, it is amibigious, difficult to manipulate, verbose, and have too many non-functional degrees of freedom. After all, that's why mathematics left natural language and adopted the mathematical syntax we have today.
Diagrams suck, they are ambigious, difficult to manipulate, verbose, and has too many non-functional degrees of freedom. That's why cook books don't have diagrams to describe recipies.
The syntax will never die, it is the only sensible we have to define programs.
And yet anytime two or more programmers get together to talk about what they are creating, they start drawing diagrams on whiteboards.
I'm not saying diagrams are useless, they just make a poor substitute for syntax.
The flowchart and decision tree exist for a reason to describe algorithms.
As long as it is very simple. Electronics already have a highly developed visual language for describing their functions - but if what was going on inside every chip was illustrated just as what was going on between chips, it would be entirely unintelligible. Instead, any visual representation is at a particular scale, and well known portions are represented as blocks with cryptic textual notes next to each interface (ACK, EN, V0+, CLK, PT2, HVSD, WTFBBQ, etc.), labels to identify company or type, and an expectation that you know what they do or can find out on your own (and not an expectation that you understand how they do it.)
Anything simple enough to be completely expressed in human-comprehensible pictures should be exposed to the user and modifiable (even if not by using pictures, but forms.) I totally agree, if that's what you and this article are trying to say. My experiences in trying to encode actual human workflows in BPMN have taught me that when using pictures it's harder to express things of any sophistication than in words - because of words like "with" and "each" and "all", "if" and "when," and because of ways things change over time, and because of separate but overlapping/interacting flows that languages can express easily but pictures not so much.
In pictures, that involves looking all over your picture for different things, trying to figure out how to draw lines to them; if the condition is once or twice removed from the object of the search, it involves trying to untangle massive knots with your eyes and memory. Theoretically, that is. What it involves in practice is scrawling words all over your picture (just like in a circuit diagram.) Words that express the same types of relationships over time and type as the picture is trying to express projected onto a plane, words that could be easily expanded to include those relationships and eliminate the 18 types of lines, the 25 types of shapes, the 12 types of shape borders, the 16 color schemes and the long list of rules for connecting them that had to be invented to avoid coming up with a textual syntax.
Going back to electronics, I don't think anyone would argue that schematic block diagrams are inferior to reading the raw netlist. Similarly, I feel programming could be improved if IDEs for popular langauges would allow connecting functions together in a streaming manner. Of course, I am aware this exists, Simulink, LabView, FPGA schematic workflow, but these are niche languages that I don't work in.
Well, no, but some may well argue that reading the HDL is better then a diagram. I have experience working with both the HDL and schematic in the FPGA world, and in my estimation text-based HDL is way better than working with a diagram.
Of course, YMMV, my brain may just be more optimized for processing text instead of images.
That should be a great fit for a textual HDL instead of labouring through a schematics mainly linking pins to pins again and again. It would even be much more expressive, now that we often have chips so big that they cannot be represented efficiently as a single symbol on a single sheet but are split in smaller blocks looking like HDL ports without the flexibility; now that µC, SoC and other kinds of chips have pins that are so much muxed out that they don't have a clear, expressible function, meaning that grouping them in blocks is more of random choice than a good solution. And this multiplexing means that you'll often have to change and change again the connections of your wires in the schematic, and that would be much easier to do with an HDL.
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That's why my mind was blown when a software job forced me to use a graphical tool like Scade. It felt like coming 20 years backwards, when in electronics HDL were not popular yet and we had to design FPGAs and such with schematics. And that was even worse, because the graphical representation looks parallel, concurrent, as a electronic schematic does, except that it doesn't match anything on the software side: first the specification/design document you have to implement is generally sequential, not concurrent, and then the generated code and the way the CPU/computer works are sequential as well, not concurrent. So you have this weird looking graphical part in the middle, which looks parallel but isn't really, and messes with your brain because you have to perpetually translate between the sequential specification to it, and from it to what it really does sequentially.
An appaling moment to do this job and discover that they considered it an improvement on C/Ada/whatever regular programming. And I didn't mention the tooling; like when what could have been a simple textual diff turns into an epic nightmare you are never sure you can trust the result, if you manage to get a result.
I've done this. It doesn't work. You need more details than can be cleanly represented on a diagram. How do you do namespacing for example? Which database schema will that box connect to? How will it reconnect?
All 'visual programming languages' fall back to text boxes constantly. Inevitably the contents of those text boxes are needed to understand or execute the visual representation of the program.
I don't think the author understands the purpose of the project. Google wants more coders. As a company Coders are likely one of Google's largest expense (At my Job staffing is 25% developers, and staffing is ~80% of our current budget). Does Google necessarily need more developers writing code? No, however they could use more people who can code to solve the small problems they face daily.
I think it's more likely we'll have people writing code informally, and as a small part of their overall job.
>Writing code will become less and less necessary, making software development more accessible to everyone.
I agree with that sentiment, however I fail to see the link between more accessible development and fewer people writing code. This process has been happening for years.
>The real benefit of something like Project Bloks is that it actually removes the code.
But is that new? What if something more advanced is needed?
Excel is a good example of writing code for a job. Access is an example of programming without writing code (it's sql with a GUI). Both tools are popular however people have a hard time doing advanced things. This is also perhaps due to the high price of creating the building block interface/software cost.
By thinking logically, people may not write code formally, they may not write any code: however it will encourage people to create solutions to the problems most applicable to them. Maybe their solution is 90% the blocks provided by their program. 10% code they wrote so handle their edge case. Perhaps it's something they only engage in one day a month.
In the end I think we'll see more code, more people writing code, and programs with more handling of the common tasks as building blocks but the ability to write code for the complex parts and plug it in where needed.
The issue with "computational thinking" in so far as how this article seems to want to teach it and how most schools often do teach it already in the real world is the tendency to stop at the basics and Office applications and just enough VBA/macros to give people a feeling of competency without giving them a glimpse into the real depths of programming and what software developers really do.
I keep wanting to make a XKCD-style sketch graph of the idea. But there's a lot of Dunning-Kruger over-competent business people that thinks all the software they need to run their business is spreadsheets and spreadsheets pretending to be databases like Access. To them real software developers seem over-paid based on their experience of Lovecraftian "systems" they can hack together given what they think they know.
That's a very real and dangerous place for business people to be, but it is unsurprisingly common. Those people don't respect programming as a discipline and a craft, and sometimes those are the people out in the corporate world controlling software developer salaries or morale...
It's also the same lack of knowledge about software as a craft (as engineering, in a very classical sense) that leads people time and time again to the well of "well in the future people won't be coding because [ Excel will do it all | There will be a visual tool everyone will easily understand | AI will do all the programming based on natural language queries | Insert some other magic idea here ]".
There's as much art to software development as there is science, and forgetting that art will still need artists and will not make itself is a strange thing that is surprising common.
To be fair, there are a lot of software developers themselves that have played into this delusion, and it's something of a trap that a software developer can easily fall into. We're trained to break down systems and try to automate them to their fullest potential and it's hard sometimes to avoid that meta-leap to wanting to do it to our own systems. We fall into building "Business Rules Engines" that we think some business users might be able to understand and comprehend and might obfuscate away the need for programming. We experiment with boondoggles like visual programming languages and "auto-coding" experiences. We get grandiose visions of the machine or software product or great AI that will make it all more accessible...
The future will probably look like the present in that regard. We'll still have the Dunning-Kruger folks building mission critical applications out of complex webs of Excel and Access and other past and future productivity tools we build in the goal of making programming more accessible. We'll still have software developers eventually hired to clean up the messes and craft versions that can sustainably last or reliably operate outside the hacked together environment from which they were originally built. There will continue to be software developers continuing to think they can build the environment that will done rule them all and save everyone time (and meanwhile eat up so much of software development budgets and time to built it)... And all of these groups will still have a hard time communicating between each other the real risks and efforts involved in any of it.
Editado: conclusion, programming is becoming harder, not easier.
So true. I'm not sure why, it shouldn't be that way.
Matter of fact, once I got past the point where the novelty of writing lots of code wore off, I'm spending most of my time trying to write less code.
That side step all these miracle solutions for bringing coding to the masses in one fell swoop and eliminating its tedium do is that "Hey, technically, if you draw pictures instead, it doesn't count as writing". Yes, technically true, totally useless. I personally believe that whoever comes up with this again and again deserves to be bludgeoned by a copy of "K&R The C Programming language", turned into a picture book. All 70,000 pages of of it, with the big glossy full-page, double-page foldout prints.
/rant