3 ms·

This is what people thought when Visual Basic was released 20 years ago. Why it hasn't happened is our programming languages are stone age tools when it comes t

by hux_ 9y ago

This is what people thought when Visual Basic was released 20 years ago. Why it hasn't happened is our programming languages are stone age tools when it comes to representing and dealing with ambiguities. All that plumbing you do is basically disambiguation. It involves (multiple) clarifying conversations, tradeoffs that you justify, taste, vision etc. Basically anything that falls under the 'there is no right answer' chapter of whatever front end text book you read. Once we have breakthroughs in natural language understanding that's when not just designers but anyone will be able do away with programmers. Despite all the AI hoopla it's not going to happen any time soon. All you have to track is how systems are dealing with ambiguity.

kartickv 9y ago
Agreed about stone-age tools. I'm not counting on AI, but on declarative programming. Imagine dragging and dropping components onto the canvas, not graphical ones like buttons and sliders but model layer ones, like classes. Each would have connections, input, output or bidirectional. And a connection could have a simple mapping function. It could be as simple as "if price > 1000, discountOffered = true". One can have preconditions that also define a remedial action to take. Going back to the e-commerce example, if the user tries to check out, a precondition might be that they're signed in, and the action would redirect them to a sign in page. As for disambiguation, the computer can just pick one alternative and do it. You'll be able to override it, but computers shouldn't require everything specified in excruciating detail. These won't eliminate all code written in conventional programming languages; just reduce it, so that engineers are more productive, and non-engineers will be able to do more than they can now.

3 ms·

This is what people thought when Visual Basic was released 20 years ago. Why it hasn't happened is our programming languages are stone age tools when it comes t

by hux_ 9y ago

kartickv 9y ago
Agreed about stone-age tools. I'm not counting on AI, but on declarative programming. Imagine dragging and dropping components onto the canvas, not graphical ones like buttons and sliders but model layer ones, like classes. Each would have connections, input, output or bidirectional. And a connection could have a simple mapping function. It could be as simple as "if price > 1000, discountOffered = true". One can have preconditions that also define a remedial action to take. Going back to the e-commerce example, if the user tries to check out, a precondition might be that they're signed in, and the action would redirect them to a sign in page. As for disambiguation, the computer can just pick one alternative and do it. You'll be able to override it, but computers shouldn't require everything specified in excruciating detail. These won't eliminate all code written in conventional programming languages; just reduce it, so that engineers are more productive, and non-engineers will be able to do more than they can now.