4 ms·

I'm excited to see what comes out of this. The area I'm hoping they'd look at is programming. There hasn't been any big ideas in programming in a really long ti

by amasad 10y ago

I'm excited to see what comes out of this. The area I'm hoping they'd look at is programming. There hasn't been any big ideas in programming in a really long time. Languages are rehashes of the same features with slightly different configurations and incremental improvement in performance or tooling. Programming interfaces are stagnant too -- Smalltalk's interactive devlopement environment is still the sci-fi version of what most people think programming could be. The programmer and the program have never been further away from each other as it is today. The development environment have never been further away from the production environment as it is today. And end-user interfaces have never been as abstracted away from computing as it is today. If any group can breathe some life into this stagnant area then my bet would be on this group.

seanmcdirmid 10y ago
Nicely put! Many of us feel the same way: how we are approaching programming through PL today in much of the academic community is contributing to those gaps, not eliminating them. There is also a chance to evolve the topic of programming to one of human advancement (among other things), the old approaches aren't moving things forward so much anyways. See what Bret Victor did with programming topics in just a few short years, I see a lot of potential there!
lewisl9029 10y ago
Eve [1] is one project I know of that has been trying to tackle this very difficult problem. The project is led by Chris Granger, whom you might know from his work on the Light Table IDE [2]. They released a video last year that showcased some iterations of their prototypes and I found them to be very innovative and promising: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZQoAKJPbh8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZQoAKJPbh8 [1] http://www.witheve.com/ http://www.witheve.com/ [2] http://lighttable.com/ http://lighttable.com/
- david927 10y ago
  Kayia (http://kayia.org http://kayia.org, my project) is also approaching programming from a very different angle. I would like to say that, since a large percentage of us know that programming is broken, we are supportive, inclusive and embrace new ideas. We don't. This industry has become a branch of the finance industry. So instead of programming being driven by math (e.g. category theory, abelian groups), it's driven by the market (e.g. time-to-market, what works now). HARC is a push back the other way, giving space to people who are thinking about it in the right way, and I applaud that. But we're still missing the 'inclusive' piece of it; until we can talk to each other and listen to each other, we'll remain frustrated.
stephengillie 10y ago
Programmers are known as "people who do not like to repeat themselves" but they spend their days typing the same brackets and 5 words. (If, else, for/foreach, select/case, string...) The next step is writing software that can write software. Maybe automated automation can't write a self-driving algorithm, but automation should be able to write the code to send email to a list of addresses. We shouldn't automate dumb things. We should automate the automation of dumb things.
- ghuntley 10y ago
  Maybe having to repeat those brackets and 5 words are soul reason why programmers don't like to repeat themselves? </showerThought>
  - stephengillie 10y ago
    If you always write the brackets when you write the "if", why not write a function that writes both for you?
onion2k 10y ago
The programmer and the program have never been further away from each other as it is today. Yet at the same time there hasn't ever been so much working software produced, or so many working programmers, so something is working. The barrier to entry to writing code has been lowered. That's a good thing. We have more people trying out their ideas now because it's easy to get something working. You can't reasonably ignore that with a hand-wavy "it could be so much better" lament. That isn't to suggest for a second that things couldn't be even better. I just think it's important to understand that getting lots of people involved in development, even if what they produce is awful, has benefits for society. That might be more important than good code.
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago
  We have easier access to computers (not true when I was growing up), we have slightly better tools, but otherwise the barriers aren't much lower. We have more people attracted to the industry-CS is the most popular major now in many schools-programming is still hard even if more people are doing it. One wonders what could be if programming was easier, being considered as such a basic skill as writing an essay.
  - onion2k 10y ago
    the barriers aren't much lower They really are. I've been writing code for 30 years (professionally for 20) and while the logic hasn't really changed a great deal, all of the things around coding absolutely have. The work necessary to get something to display on a screen, the speed of both compiling code and running an application, the sheer quantity and quality of example code to learn from, the tools available to do things like source control and testing, the libraries that do most of the work so you can concentrate on the bit you're actually interested in, the quality of debugging tools and error messages that a language will give you ... all of these things add up to an environment where writing code is just so much simpler than it ever has been before. All that means that beginners can concentrate on learning rather than getting frustrated by incomprehensible messages that they need to look up in a manual and decipher because a lot of technical writing was pretty awful back then. It's impossible to overemphasise how important it is when you're learning to be able to concentrate on what you're trying to figure out without needing to worry about other stuff that might distract you. That is what's made it easier to get in to development.
iso-8859-1 10y ago
There are a bunch of projects claiming to be next-gen though. The thing is, if you change the paradigm, you sometimes have to redo the whole toolchain (like VCS and so on). See http://www.lamdu.org/ http://www.lamdu.org/
- david927 10y ago
  A bunch of projects, true, though much fewer than I would like to see. But you're right; for my project we scrapped it all. What's left is essentially a thin VM layer over hardware. It was the only way.
Joeri 10y ago
I think the fundamental issue that makes programming hard, and harder with time, is that we don't describe goals, we describe steps towards a goal. The computer only understands how to move through the state space, it does not understand where to go. We end up reverse engineering the goal / end result into the series of steps / state transitions needed to get there, and we call this activity programming. The core problem there is two-fold. One, humans are bad at breaking things down explicitly into steps, and we make errors of description and errors of omission, which we call bugs. The program arrives at a goal, it is just the wrong one. Second, that goals grow more ambitious with time. At one point making a basic spreadsheet was a major endeavour, now it is a practical exercise as part of a programming course. Because the goal is more complex / further away, the number of steps required grows bigger. The current focus of tooling is in ways to make it easier to describe the steps, by giving you starting points closer to the goal (frameworks and blueprints) or by making the steps bigger (languages, libraries and abstractions) or by agreeing on patterns of steps, etc... I think this line of thinking, while important, is inherently limited in its ability to solve the problem. Fundamentally, the trick to making programming easy is to turn it into something goal-oriented instead of step-oriented. You describe the desired results and the computer works out all steps regardless of the state space, and adapts as the state space changes (new data, changing circumstances). Basically this is what unit tests do, minus the part of programming the code behind the test. But imagine one person writes only tests, and one writes only code. Replace the second person by an algorithm, and tada, goal-oriented programming. That part looks solvable to me. But ... now the problem becomes one of describing the goal, and we're merely shifting piles around in the problem space. Someone who cracks the problem of easily and accurately describing a goal would solve the harder half of the problem. Anyway, just my two cents.
- schoen 10y ago
  There's already logic programming and more generally declarative programming, which sort of have the features you describe (the programmer describes what is wanted, but not necessarily how to find or do it). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarative_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarative_programming It's clear that these paradigms can be easier for solving certain kinds of problems. For example, they're very good for solving puzzles like Sudoku; instead of writing a full-fledged Sudoku solver, you can, in some of these environments, basically just describe what would constitute a solution to your problem, and then the programming environment can find one for you.

by amasad 10y ago

seanmcdirmid 10y ago

Nicely put! Many of us feel the same way: how we are approaching programming through PL today in much of the academic community is contributing to those gaps, not eliminating them. There is also a chance to evolve the topic of programming to one of human advancement (among other things), the old approaches aren't moving things forward so much anyways. See what Bret Victor did with programming topics in just a few short years, I see a lot of potential there!

lewisl9029 10y ago

Eve [1] is one project I know of that has been trying to tackle this very difficult problem. The project is led by Chris Granger, whom you might know from his work on the Light Table IDE [2]. They released a video last year that showcased some iterations of their prototypes and I found them to be very innovative and promising: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZQoAKJPbh8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZQoAKJPbh8 [1] http://www.witheve.com/ http://www.witheve.com/ [2] http://lighttable.com/ http://lighttable.com/

david927 10y ago
Kayia (http://kayia.org http://kayia.org, my project) is also approaching programming from a very different angle. I would like to say that, since a large percentage of us know that programming is broken, we are supportive, inclusive and embrace new ideas. We don't. This industry has become a branch of the finance industry. So instead of programming being driven by math (e.g. category theory, abelian groups), it's driven by the market (e.g. time-to-market, what works now). HARC is a push back the other way, giving space to people who are thinking about it in the right way, and I applaud that. But we're still missing the 'inclusive' piece of it; until we can talk to each other and listen to each other, we'll remain frustrated.

stephengillie 10y ago

Programmers are known as "people who do not like to repeat themselves" but they spend their days typing the same brackets and 5 words. (If, else, for/foreach, select/case, string...) The next step is writing software that can write software. Maybe automated automation can't write a self-driving algorithm, but automation should be able to write the code to send email to a list of addresses. We shouldn't automate dumb things. We should automate the automation of dumb things.

ghuntley 10y ago
Maybe having to repeat those brackets and 5 words are soul reason why programmers don't like to repeat themselves? </showerThought>
- stephengillie 10y ago
  If you always write the brackets when you write the "if", why not write a function that writes both for you?

onion2k 10y ago

The programmer and the program have never been further away from each other as it is today. Yet at the same time there hasn't ever been so much working software produced, or so many working programmers, so something is working. The barrier to entry to writing code has been lowered. That's a good thing. We have more people trying out their ideas now because it's easy to get something working. You can't reasonably ignore that with a hand-wavy "it could be so much better" lament. That isn't to suggest for a second that things couldn't be even better. I just think it's important to understand that getting lots of people involved in development, even if what they produce is awful, has benefits for society. That might be more important than good code.

seanmcdirmid 10y ago
We have easier access to computers (not true when I was growing up), we have slightly better tools, but otherwise the barriers aren't much lower. We have more people attracted to the industry-CS is the most popular major now in many schools-programming is still hard even if more people are doing it. One wonders what could be if programming was easier, being considered as such a basic skill as writing an essay.
- onion2k 10y ago
  the barriers aren't much lower They really are. I've been writing code for 30 years (professionally for 20) and while the logic hasn't really changed a great deal, all of the things around coding absolutely have. The work necessary to get something to display on a screen, the speed of both compiling code and running an application, the sheer quantity and quality of example code to learn from, the tools available to do things like source control and testing, the libraries that do most of the work so you can concentrate on the bit you're actually interested in, the quality of debugging tools and error messages that a language will give you ... all of these things add up to an environment where writing code is just so much simpler than it ever has been before. All that means that beginners can concentrate on learning rather than getting frustrated by incomprehensible messages that they need to look up in a manual and decipher because a lot of technical writing was pretty awful back then. It's impossible to overemphasise how important it is when you're learning to be able to concentrate on what you're trying to figure out without needing to worry about other stuff that might distract you. That is what's made it easier to get in to development.

iso-8859-1 10y ago

There are a bunch of projects claiming to be next-gen though. The thing is, if you change the paradigm, you sometimes have to redo the whole toolchain (like VCS and so on). See http://www.lamdu.org/ http://www.lamdu.org/

david927 10y ago
A bunch of projects, true, though much fewer than I would like to see. But you're right; for my project we scrapped it all. What's left is essentially a thin VM layer over hardware. It was the only way.

Joeri 10y ago

I think the fundamental issue that makes programming hard, and harder with time, is that we don't describe goals, we describe steps towards a goal. The computer only understands how to move through the state space, it does not understand where to go. We end up reverse engineering the goal / end result into the series of steps / state transitions needed to get there, and we call this activity programming. The core problem there is two-fold. One, humans are bad at breaking things down explicitly into steps, and we make errors of description and errors of omission, which we call bugs. The program arrives at a goal, it is just the wrong one. Second, that goals grow more ambitious with time. At one point making a basic spreadsheet was a major endeavour, now it is a practical exercise as part of a programming course. Because the goal is more complex / further away, the number of steps required grows bigger. The current focus of tooling is in ways to make it easier to describe the steps, by giving you starting points closer to the goal (frameworks and blueprints) or by making the steps bigger (languages, libraries and abstractions) or by agreeing on patterns of steps, etc... I think this line of thinking, while important, is inherently limited in its ability to solve the problem. Fundamentally, the trick to making programming easy is to turn it into something goal-oriented instead of step-oriented. You describe the desired results and the computer works out all steps regardless of the state space, and adapts as the state space changes (new data, changing circumstances). Basically this is what unit tests do, minus the part of programming the code behind the test. But imagine one person writes only tests, and one writes only code. Replace the second person by an algorithm, and tada, goal-oriented programming. That part looks solvable to me. But ... now the problem becomes one of describing the goal, and we're merely shifting piles around in the problem space. Someone who cracks the problem of easily and accurately describing a goal would solve the harder half of the problem. Anyway, just my two cents.

schoen 10y ago
There's already logic programming and more generally declarative programming, which sort of have the features you describe (the programmer describes what is wanted, but not necessarily how to find or do it). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarative_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarative_programming It's clear that these paradigms can be easier for solving certain kinds of problems. For example, they're very good for solving puzzles like Sudoku; instead of writing a full-fledged Sudoku solver, you can, in some of these environments, basically just describe what would constitute a solution to your problem, and then the programming environment can find one for you.