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The author is 100% correct on everything. Programming is massively over-complicated for no useful reason. Programmers tend to get very proud of the completely

The author is 100% correct on everything. Programming is massively over-complicated for no useful reason. Programmers tend to get very proud of the completely pointless knowledge they have to acquire to use the pointlessly complicated tools they do, and they confuse that with being clever. It's not. It's really not. Nothing has to be this esoteric and annoying. We've just chosen to keep things like this because we think it makes us clever. Programming can and should be much, much more user friendly than it is now.

DanielKehoe 6y ago
It's time to refactor the last ten years of professional web development.
- user-the-name 6y ago
  It's time top refactor the last THIRTY years of absolute garbage development in general.
  - lionkor 6y ago
    What programming projects have you completed in the last 10 years?
    - user-the-name 6y ago
      Too many to list. Currently working as a senior programmer for the user-facing client for a company worth hundreds of millions, with an app store rating of 4.9. Previously, I've developed open source software that got 5000-10000 downloads a day, and a few private commercial projects that pulled in a few thousand dollars a month. A recent open source project on github has 8k stars. Is that enough credentials to listen to what I say?
      - lionkor 6y ago
        It's enough credentials to make your criticisms worth thinking about. It's fascinating how, in a few years, I got so familiar with the commandline and never felt like it was too complicated (although I do almost everything through it), both at work and privately. Maybe, with a skillset like that, you could just make the things better that you dont like, instead of what looks like "just complaining".
        user-the-name 6y ago
        I have in the past implemented my own shell to work around some of the limitations the usual one had. But today, I feel no real motivation to do so, because I know that if I tried to release this, the main response I would get would essentially be complaints that I shouldn't be changing things. I don't think any attempt to improve things would be accepted, because people refuse to believe there is anything wrong with what we have.
        robertlagrant 6y ago
        How did you decide what program runs when a user types a command in a directory, without using the concept of a path?
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
kichimi 6y ago
Please explain how the command-line is pointless. If investing time into learning the ins and outs of a complicated system does not make you clever then please explain to me what does make someone clever?
- oefrha 6y ago
  > please explain to me what does make someone clever? Dismissing other people’s work as awful, pointless on the Internet. Well, at least it makes you look clever, in certain eyes.
- user-the-name 6y ago
  "The command line" is not pointless. The current popular implementation of a command line, is, however, pointlessly complicated and esoteric for no real gain. It could be improved massively.
  - kichimi 6y ago
    Which one? Please explain how it's pointless. What is esoteric about typing which program you want to run?
    - user-the-name 6y ago
      Standard unix shells. They contain a massive amount of complexity and obfuscation that only exists because that's how it was always done and nobody dares change it any longer.
      - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
        Like what? Please be specific or we can't have a meaningful discussion. I use Bash a fair amount and I don't consider it overly complicated as a shell. There are some rough edges in Unix, like handling spaces in directories, and I'm no fan of Bash as a scripting language, but I wouldn't say the basic model of the Unix command-line interface is overly complicated.
pjc50 6y ago
Please demonstrate your simple alternative and its acceptance testing on real users.
- user-the-name 6y ago
  Why? You are allowed to point out failings without having a perfect solution at hand.
  - kichimi 6y ago
    He's asking you to back up your assertations. If all you have is an easily produced vague thought then it can be dismissed just as easily.
    - user-the-name 6y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25789651 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25789651
  - ccmcarey 6y ago
    It's just kind of .. pathetic, to make statements like: > Programming is massively over-complicated for no useful reason And then offer absolutely no justification for why this is the case, and to shrug off any questions as to what obvious improvements could be made. You offer no useful contributions to the conversation by doing this. None.
    - user-the-name 6y ago
      Well, here's an example: You can develop a fully featured, world-class iOS app, and distribute it, without even touching a command line. Nothing in the process would get easier by touching a command line. You just don't need it. There is a fully-featured environment that provides all the tooling you need without it.
      - d3ckard 6y ago
ryankrage77 6y ago
I think both points are true. You can get low-level and write assembly on a 6505. Or you can write python programs in Python. Or you can break out a terminal & node.js and a browser and build an entire website. But you'll need to put in different amounts of time, effort, and research to achieve these different things.
cdu1 6y ago
"Programming can and should be much, much more user friendly than it is now." While there's no doubt there are some libraries/tools/systems which are poorly designed, perceived complexity may often be due to the requirement to support a wide variety of new and legacy systems or to support layers of the tech stack that many people are not even aware of. "We've just chosen to keep things like this because we think it makes us clever." If I could make my job any simpler I would jump at the opportunity. Personally I often marvel at how relatively quick and easy it is to quickly develop useful programs. Perhaps if you try implementing some of these more simple tools the reasons for the underlying complexity will reveal themselves.
- humanrebar 6y ago
  Agreed. Two of the pieces of irreducible complexity that beginners have problems understanding (or even appreciating!) are change management and software delivery. If a newcomer created a simple but novel program and it turned out to be successful, two sure-to-follow requirements are: - Now someone else wants to access and suggest changes to your project. In parallel. Without breaking anything. - Now the software needs to be shared with others outside of the development environment. Both create a surprising amount of complexity and require fourth- and fifth-dimensional thinking. You have to learn a version control system (probably)! You have to learn how to perform a code review! You have to do learn software design and hopefully documentation. You have to learn and leverage at least one packaging ecosystem for the development approach that was chosen. Hopefully you chose one with an accessible packaging ecosystem, assuming that exists!
  - user-the-name 6y ago
    None of that complexity, as it exists today, is particularly irreducible.
fisensee 6y ago
While I understand and recognize the frustration with programming today, I wonder if comments like these have any sort of factual basis to them. What exactly is over-complicated for no useful reason? And what are the ways to fix this? I haven't looked at every "coding for non-coders" app, but all I've seen fail in offering the same functionality as coding in itself does. How would the ideal way to programm look like where you have the same freedoms you have with todays languages, tools, frameworks, etc. while still being easy and intuitive to use?
- m1gu3l 6y ago
  Remember that for all the time spent trying to figure out these philosophical conundrums in our trade tech debt is still piling up and someone else is out there writing actual code/working... these are nice things to think about but don’t get hung up on them. Lots of this is subjective stuff that has no answer and the code isn’t going to write itself (not yet).
collyw 6y ago
I am not sure how true this is. There have been numerous attempts at visual programming and they have generally turned out to be crap. Because syntax is actually a relativity small part of the problem.
- user-the-name 6y ago
  It has nothing to do with visual programming. Which, by the way, is in massive, wide-scale use today. Game engines tend to use it, audio processing software uses it, and scientific control software also use them. But no, what I am talking about is all the tooling around the programming, which in turn relies on the massively archaic Unix command line.
  - rowanG077 6y ago
    Visual programming can work in specific domains. But I've never seen it used in large general purpose systems.
    - user-the-name 6y ago
      That is because it is not good for large general purpose systems. But it is good for specific domains.
    - mypalmike 6y ago
      There have been some general purpose visual programming environments which have had some degree of uptake. Prograph is one (http://www.andescotia.com/products/marten/ http://www.andescotia.com/products/marten/) - it is certainly niche but apparently there are users.
Bombthecat 6y ago
You see that absolutely in every "new". Programming language. It starts simple, beautiful, easy to read and understand. And 10 years later: people want ways to write a ten liner, in one line compressed. The first one is easy to understand, easy to follow, the second one, not so much, even for the person who wrote it.. (after doing something else for a year for example) I hate it...
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > And 10 years later: people want ways to write a ten liner, in one line compressed. There is nothing wrong with that. People want to work with higher-level concepts, which allows them to solve more complex problems without burning their brains out. I'd go as far as saying that the utility of a programming language is measured in its ability to compress code with abstractions. All this means you have to first understand the abstractive tooling and the abstraction itself before you can work with it, but this is how it should be. Most programming languages are tools, not toys. The alternative would be to handicap all programming, make it impossible to solve complex problems with it for the sake of beginners, who want to get accolades without putting in work. You can't run an industry on participation trophies. By this line of thinking, we wouldn't have this conversation because inventing computers took work. Hell, none of us would have any conversation whatsoever, because language itself is something that takes years to learn.
mrweasel 6y ago
While it's a massive simplification of programming as a whole, I think you're at least partly right. Programming is in some cases over-complicated, for no reason. If you dig deeper however, you'll sometimes learn that the thing you considered overly complicated, was actually designed that way, not to annoy you, but because the same tool has to support use cases you didn't consider or don't understand. That's not to say that things couldn't be simpler in many cases.
- yodelshady 6y ago
  Perhaps we're bad at allocating tools to use cases, particularly for education. Witness, say, beginner python tutorials that start with "These 15 tools let you set up a development/testing environment that ensures your code can be tested against every platform that has ever run python". Useful tools, but poorly matched to the 'I just want to *learn how to* print "Hello World"' use case. I suspect we're all a little guilty of that occasionally.
- macspoofing 6y ago
  >Programming is in some cases over-complicated, for no reason. Which part is over-complicated for no reason?
  - humanrebar 6y ago
    Everything happens for some reason if we want to be pedantic. I think the point was that some things do not justify their complexity. Especially if you discount inertia. Trivial example: the creat function could have been named create. That's one more thing folks just have to know and the reason for it isn't much better than "just because".
    - macspoofing 6y ago
      >I think the point was that some things do not justify their complexity. Especially if you discount inertia. Again, can you provide an example? Because like you implied, tools like node.js and npm, were made with a purpose. They are professional tools made for professional programmers to solve commercial problems. They aren't made for beginners and novices to teach them about programming concepts. Their complexities stems from the fact that they need to support all kinds of deployment and runtime use-cases and can't be too opinioned on how they should be used. >Trivial example: the creat function could have been named create That's your example? Really?
avindroth 6y ago
You say it like pointing out an obvious problem is hard to do. Programming is a very complicated activity, and of course it can be improved. Anything can be improved. There is no doubt about that. The question is whether it is easy to improve. Writing good software is hard. You say it like programmers have ego, but you know what is better than ego? Money. People would lay down their ego to make money (by making a more user-friendly app). But clearly it’s hard to write good apps. If you try any graphical programs you would see that it sucks. You default back to the terminal and vim because it’s better. I choose what works, not what gives me pride because this is work not hobby.
- user-the-name 6y ago
  I write code for a company worth hundreds of millions every day, with a world-class user rating. I don't use the command line at all. I CAN use the command line. I know very well how to do it. I have done it for decades. But when I program for iOS, I don't need it. The tooling is good enough that I never need to. So I don't. There's no reason this couldn't be the case for other environment too. There's nothing magical about iOS other than that Apple actually values developer convenience and put the effort in that others are unwilling to do.
  - xenocratus 6y ago
    This reminds me of the timeless quote: > Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should. You can take that either way :)
  - imtringued 6y ago
    You can just start up Eclipse or Visual Studio (the original) and have the exact same experience. That's how I started with Java and zero Linux knowledge. What you are really complaining about is the fact that nobody is there to shout in your face that these options exist.
    - user-the-name 6y ago
      Can you do that for node.js, like the person in the linked article wants to use?
m1gu3l 6y ago
How? It seems like you and the author are at the same energy level of complaining without putting up real ideas. How would you “fix” programming then?
krageon 6y ago
The problem isn't the user-friendliness of the tools (many very friendly tools exist), it's the amount of energy the author is willing to invest (approximately none). When exposed to truly trivial tooling, the problem becomes a lack of practice in the type of thinking that leads to good programs. There we see that the core of the issue why programming isn't "easy" is that it's just not. It takes practice to get computers to do what you want to do well and no matter what tools you use getting to know the tools will not even take 5% of the time that you need to get to a place where you do what you want. Furthermore, the clamoring that there is some sort of nefarious gatekeeping cabal keeping programming from being easy to whoever cares to shout about it is fundamentally dismissive of the actual effort and practice put in by people who used to have (but no longer have) this problem. Sometimes the answer is just that it's not trivial thing to do and this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. We don't think this of math, we don't think this of making good drawings or paintings.
- macspoofing 6y ago
  >We don't think this of math We do and we try every which way to make it 'natural' and 'easy', sometimes with vaunted social goals like stemming drop-out rates. The reality is, at some point, you just have to sit down, put your head down, and power through. Sometimes, like you alluded, there are no shortcuts. There are programming environments (sometimes even gamified) for learning, but if you want to use something to solve general purpose problems, you just have to learn it.
  - krageon 6y ago
    Perhaps this is a cultural difference then, efforts to make math 'natural' and 'easy' are not something my secondary education had. You could either do it or you could not and if you could not you were put in a class that had basically no math (or just some very simple math if you picked economics).
- kortex 6y ago
  > ... it's the amount of energy the author is willing to invest (approximately none). When exposed to truly trivial tooling, the problem becomes a lack of practice in the type of thinking that leads to good programs. There we see that the core of the issue why programming isn't "easy" is that it's just not. If PATH and installing python is a struggle for them, hoo boy, no wonder they don't feel like part of the "code club". I merely type into my favorite search bar with auto complete "make sure /u" And I get: "make sure /usr/local/bin is in your $path" And top result is a SO spelling out what this message means and how to check. Engineering, of any discipline, is the sum of three phases: domain research, applying that knowledge to build something, testing that thing you built. With experience, you spend less time on 1 and more on 2, but with learning software, you spend the lion's share in 1. We still need to lower the barriers to entry. That involves teaching heuristics on how to solve problems.
pcthrowaway 6y ago
> The author is 100% correct on everything. The author is certainly correct on some things, but makes no good argument for why node.js should run in the Browser. I'm not even clear he understands what node is, or what he would gain from being able to use it in the browser, when it can already run Javascript just fine as is. No, Google should stop the show and bring node.js to his browser because he can't be bothered to go to Google to look up what a PATH is. I'm not saying programming can't be much more user-friendly; it certainly can be and should. Heck, maybe Chrome would do well to ship with a lightweight IDE to edit code in outside of the console. But the author hasn't listed a reason node.js has a place in Chrome natively, and is going on to claim they should. Talk about entitlement.
- xenocratus 6y ago
  It's by no means an IDE, but Chrome does have Workspaces: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/workspaces https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/work... . In any case, I remember using this (or something similar that maybe I forgot?) when I was doing frontend work, it was quite neat, especially if you had a local server recompiling things as you made changes.
- imtringued 6y ago
  There are tools that do what he wants but they are not node.js. That's the problem. The insistence on a specific tool and the desire that the entire world changes to accommodate you instead of just picking a different tool that does what you want.
grumple 6y ago
> Programming can and should be much, much more user friendly than it is now. For what sort of users? It's clear a number of people here consider the command line difficult. I do not. There are many tools that make simple tasks very simple. I use it for manipulating tab files. I can pipe data through scripts and back through command line utilities, pipe it directly into a database, or do the reverse. It's very simple, and very powerful. Just because you don't understand it or aren't familiar with it doesn't mean it isn't simple, powerful, and user friendly. Most programming languages are very simple. a = 1, b = 2, if a+b > 2, doSomething(). You can't actually make the logic simpler than that - this is why visual programming fails. It's still programming, but it turns out a limited visual/gui tool to do these logical operations is much harder to manage and work with than actual code.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  > For what sort of users? It's clear a number of people here consider the command line difficult. I do not. There are many tools that make simple tasks very simple. I use it for manipulating tab files. I can pipe data through scripts and back through command line utilities, pipe it directly into a database, or do the reverse. It's very simple, and very powerful. Consider all the things you've committed to memory that you've had to learn to do those things: all the archaic command names, all the one-letter switches, all the unreadable awk lines to re-jigger the formatting between tools, all the gotchyas and edge-cases you had to deal with in your scripting language, etc.
  - minkzilla 6y ago
    But in the long run knowing all that makes it easier. We could have some GUI for doing all those things but it would end up being a massive mess of buttons EVERYWHERE and endless menus. And maybe a nice wizard could be designed for the given example that you could check the boxes as you go and it would be easy to figure out the first time. But after 5 years of doing this same thing do you want to spend 2 minutes clicking through a wizard every time or do you want to have spent a little time learning some cryptic commands a couple years back and now you can type it out in 20 seconds. Or better yet you made a script and it takes 1 second to run ./processAndInsertToDevDb I think the point is that most programming tools aren’t made to be easy to use the first time. They’re made so that the 100th or 1000th time it’s fast even if every time it’s been a little different.
imtringued 6y ago
>Programmers tend to get very proud of the completely pointless knowledge they have to acquire to use the pointlessly complicated tools they do, and they confuse that with being clever. You need that knowledge to build production level applications. The problem is not that these tools are useless, but rather that the audience you are thinking of doesn't care about them. Instead of crapping on other's people's work just look for things that are actually suitable for your own needs instead of trying to one up the experts. >It's not. It's really not. Nothing has to be this esoteric and annoying. We've just chosen to keep things like this because we think it makes us clever. I'll be honest. I don't like people like you. You are making things harder for yourself. You have chosen to go down a difficult path and then you complain that the experts that need these difficult tools are stupid. Why? There are lots of easy to learn programming languages. You can start off with a very limited and restricted environment. Just fire up a google spreadsheet and start writing javascript if that is all you want. Don't complain that writing a production level web application is difficult because you need to know about complicated things like what a HTTP server is and why it has to run on port xyz and why everyone calls their own computer localhost. >Programming can and should be much, much more user friendly than it is now. It is so user friendly even kids can pick it up if their game supports modding. You're not looking hard enough. If someone were to hand you everything on a silver platter you would never learn on your own.
macspoofing 6y ago
>Programmers tend to get very proud of the completely pointless knowledge they have to acquire to use the pointlessly complicated tools they do, and they confuse that with being clever. Like what?
chme 6y ago
> The author is 100% correct on everything. Programming is massively over-complicated for no useful reason. I don't know of any developer that likes complexity for complexity sake for productive systems. I know there are some esoteric programming languages or obfuscation techniques that make simple things more complex, but they a either meant as a challenge for fun or efforts to protect IP. Do you have some examples where you have observed such design decisions?
- z3t4 6y ago
  I like to nominate frameworks for the complication category. People say they don't want to reinvent the wheel, but what they really mean is that they want to have the training wheel on.
iso1631 6y ago
> The author is 100% correct on everything. Programming is massively over-complicated for no useful reason. What are you trying to do? Say I'm Santa and have a list of names in "naughtynice.lst", in the format Joey Bloggs,train,nice Johnny Doe,car,naughty Mary Lamb,car,nice etc I can get my shopping list by simply creating a file on my machine my $i = 0; my $toys = {}; my $coal = 0; while (<>) { chomp; my ($name, $toy, $nice) = split(/,/); if ($nice eq "nice") { $toys->{$toy}++; } else { $coal = $coal++; } } print "$_: ".$toys->{$_}."\n" foreach keys (%{$toys}); print "coal: $coal\n"; and then typing perl test.pl naughtnice.lst to run it. Python I assume is similar. I'm fairly sure that OSX comes with perl, python and bash if nothing else. Now you could say that you don't like the syntax of perl, or python, or basic, or java, but actually knocking up a quick program and running is no harder than writing that same code in some hidden part of excel

DanielKehoe 6y ago

It's time to refactor the last ten years of professional web development.

user-the-name 6y ago
It's time top refactor the last THIRTY years of absolute garbage development in general.
- lionkor 6y ago
  What programming projects have you completed in the last 10 years?
  - user-the-name 6y ago
    Too many to list. Currently working as a senior programmer for the user-facing client for a company worth hundreds of millions, with an app store rating of 4.9. Previously, I've developed open source software that got 5000-10000 downloads a day, and a few private commercial projects that pulled in a few thousand dollars a month. A recent open source project on github has 8k stars. Is that enough credentials to listen to what I say?
    - lionkor 6y ago
      It's enough credentials to make your criticisms worth thinking about. It's fascinating how, in a few years, I got so familiar with the commandline and never felt like it was too complicated (although I do almost everything through it), both at work and privately. Maybe, with a skillset like that, you could just make the things better that you dont like, instead of what looks like "just complaining".
      - user-the-name 6y ago
        I have in the past implemented my own shell to work around some of the limitations the usual one had. But today, I feel no real motivation to do so, because I know that if I tried to release this, the main response I would get would essentially be complaints that I shouldn't be changing things. I don't think any attempt to improve things would be accepted, because people refuse to believe there is anything wrong with what we have.
        robertlagrant 6y ago
        How did you decide what program runs when a user types a command in a directory, without using the concept of a path?
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]

kichimi 6y ago

Please explain how the command-line is pointless. If investing time into learning the ins and outs of a complicated system does not make you clever then please explain to me what does make someone clever?

oefrha 6y ago
> please explain to me what does make someone clever? Dismissing other people’s work as awful, pointless on the Internet. Well, at least it makes you look clever, in certain eyes.
user-the-name 6y ago
"The command line" is not pointless. The current popular implementation of a command line, is, however, pointlessly complicated and esoteric for no real gain. It could be improved massively.
- kichimi 6y ago
  Which one? Please explain how it's pointless. What is esoteric about typing which program you want to run?
  - user-the-name 6y ago
    Standard unix shells. They contain a massive amount of complexity and obfuscation that only exists because that's how it was always done and nobody dares change it any longer.
    - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
      Like what? Please be specific or we can't have a meaningful discussion. I use Bash a fair amount and I don't consider it overly complicated as a shell. There are some rough edges in Unix, like handling spaces in directories, and I'm no fan of Bash as a scripting language, but I wouldn't say the basic model of the Unix command-line interface is overly complicated.

pjc50 6y ago

Please demonstrate your simple alternative and its acceptance testing on real users.

user-the-name 6y ago
Why? You are allowed to point out failings without having a perfect solution at hand.
- kichimi 6y ago
  He's asking you to back up your assertations. If all you have is an easily produced vague thought then it can be dismissed just as easily.
  - user-the-name 6y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25789651 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25789651
- ccmcarey 6y ago
  It's just kind of .. pathetic, to make statements like: > Programming is massively over-complicated for no useful reason And then offer absolutely no justification for why this is the case, and to shrug off any questions as to what obvious improvements could be made. You offer no useful contributions to the conversation by doing this. None.
  - user-the-name 6y ago
    Well, here's an example: You can develop a fully featured, world-class iOS app, and distribute it, without even touching a command line. Nothing in the process would get easier by touching a command line. You just don't need it. There is a fully-featured environment that provides all the tooling you need without it.
    - d3ckard 6y ago

ryankrage77 6y ago

I think both points are true. You can get low-level and write assembly on a 6505. Or you can write python programs in Python. Or you can break out a terminal & node.js and a browser and build an entire website. But you'll need to put in different amounts of time, effort, and research to achieve these different things.

cdu1 6y ago

"Programming can and should be much, much more user friendly than it is now." While there's no doubt there are some libraries/tools/systems which are poorly designed, perceived complexity may often be due to the requirement to support a wide variety of new and legacy systems or to support layers of the tech stack that many people are not even aware of. "We've just chosen to keep things like this because we think it makes us clever." If I could make my job any simpler I would jump at the opportunity. Personally I often marvel at how relatively quick and easy it is to quickly develop useful programs. Perhaps if you try implementing some of these more simple tools the reasons for the underlying complexity will reveal themselves.

humanrebar 6y ago
Agreed. Two of the pieces of irreducible complexity that beginners have problems understanding (or even appreciating!) are change management and software delivery. If a newcomer created a simple but novel program and it turned out to be successful, two sure-to-follow requirements are: - Now someone else wants to access and suggest changes to your project. In parallel. Without breaking anything. - Now the software needs to be shared with others outside of the development environment. Both create a surprising amount of complexity and require fourth- and fifth-dimensional thinking. You have to learn a version control system (probably)! You have to learn how to perform a code review! You have to do learn software design and hopefully documentation. You have to learn and leverage at least one packaging ecosystem for the development approach that was chosen. Hopefully you chose one with an accessible packaging ecosystem, assuming that exists!
- user-the-name 6y ago
  None of that complexity, as it exists today, is particularly irreducible.

fisensee 6y ago

While I understand and recognize the frustration with programming today, I wonder if comments like these have any sort of factual basis to them. What exactly is over-complicated for no useful reason? And what are the ways to fix this? I haven't looked at every "coding for non-coders" app, but all I've seen fail in offering the same functionality as coding in itself does. How would the ideal way to programm look like where you have the same freedoms you have with todays languages, tools, frameworks, etc. while still being easy and intuitive to use?

m1gu3l 6y ago
Remember that for all the time spent trying to figure out these philosophical conundrums in our trade tech debt is still piling up and someone else is out there writing actual code/working... these are nice things to think about but don’t get hung up on them. Lots of this is subjective stuff that has no answer and the code isn’t going to write itself (not yet).

collyw 6y ago

I am not sure how true this is. There have been numerous attempts at visual programming and they have generally turned out to be crap. Because syntax is actually a relativity small part of the problem.

user-the-name 6y ago
It has nothing to do with visual programming. Which, by the way, is in massive, wide-scale use today. Game engines tend to use it, audio processing software uses it, and scientific control software also use them. But no, what I am talking about is all the tooling around the programming, which in turn relies on the massively archaic Unix command line.
- rowanG077 6y ago
  Visual programming can work in specific domains. But I've never seen it used in large general purpose systems.
  - user-the-name 6y ago
    That is because it is not good for large general purpose systems. But it is good for specific domains.
  - mypalmike 6y ago
    There have been some general purpose visual programming environments which have had some degree of uptake. Prograph is one (http://www.andescotia.com/products/marten/ http://www.andescotia.com/products/marten/) - it is certainly niche but apparently there are users.

Bombthecat 6y ago

You see that absolutely in every "new". Programming language. It starts simple, beautiful, easy to read and understand. And 10 years later: people want ways to write a ten liner, in one line compressed. The first one is easy to understand, easy to follow, the second one, not so much, even for the person who wrote it.. (after doing something else for a year for example) I hate it...

TeMPOraL 6y ago
> And 10 years later: people want ways to write a ten liner, in one line compressed. There is nothing wrong with that. People want to work with higher-level concepts, which allows them to solve more complex problems without burning their brains out. I'd go as far as saying that the utility of a programming language is measured in its ability to compress code with abstractions. All this means you have to first understand the abstractive tooling and the abstraction itself before you can work with it, but this is how it should be. Most programming languages are tools, not toys. The alternative would be to handicap all programming, make it impossible to solve complex problems with it for the sake of beginners, who want to get accolades without putting in work. You can't run an industry on participation trophies. By this line of thinking, we wouldn't have this conversation because inventing computers took work. Hell, none of us would have any conversation whatsoever, because language itself is something that takes years to learn.

mrweasel 6y ago

While it's a massive simplification of programming as a whole, I think you're at least partly right. Programming is in some cases over-complicated, for no reason. If you dig deeper however, you'll sometimes learn that the thing you considered overly complicated, was actually designed that way, not to annoy you, but because the same tool has to support use cases you didn't consider or don't understand. That's not to say that things couldn't be simpler in many cases.

yodelshady 6y ago
Perhaps we're bad at allocating tools to use cases, particularly for education. Witness, say, beginner python tutorials that start with "These 15 tools let you set up a development/testing environment that ensures your code can be tested against every platform that has ever run python". Useful tools, but poorly matched to the 'I just want to *learn how to* print "Hello World"' use case. I suspect we're all a little guilty of that occasionally.
macspoofing 6y ago
>Programming is in some cases over-complicated, for no reason. Which part is over-complicated for no reason?
- humanrebar 6y ago
  Everything happens for some reason if we want to be pedantic. I think the point was that some things do not justify their complexity. Especially if you discount inertia. Trivial example: the creat function could have been named create. That's one more thing folks just have to know and the reason for it isn't much better than "just because".
  - macspoofing 6y ago
    >I think the point was that some things do not justify their complexity. Especially if you discount inertia. Again, can you provide an example? Because like you implied, tools like node.js and npm, were made with a purpose. They are professional tools made for professional programmers to solve commercial problems. They aren't made for beginners and novices to teach them about programming concepts. Their complexities stems from the fact that they need to support all kinds of deployment and runtime use-cases and can't be too opinioned on how they should be used. >Trivial example: the creat function could have been named create That's your example? Really?

avindroth 6y ago

You say it like pointing out an obvious problem is hard to do. Programming is a very complicated activity, and of course it can be improved. Anything can be improved. There is no doubt about that. The question is whether it is easy to improve. Writing good software is hard. You say it like programmers have ego, but you know what is better than ego? Money. People would lay down their ego to make money (by making a more user-friendly app). But clearly it’s hard to write good apps. If you try any graphical programs you would see that it sucks. You default back to the terminal and vim because it’s better. I choose what works, not what gives me pride because this is work not hobby.

user-the-name 6y ago
I write code for a company worth hundreds of millions every day, with a world-class user rating. I don't use the command line at all. I CAN use the command line. I know very well how to do it. I have done it for decades. But when I program for iOS, I don't need it. The tooling is good enough that I never need to. So I don't. There's no reason this couldn't be the case for other environment too. There's nothing magical about iOS other than that Apple actually values developer convenience and put the effort in that others are unwilling to do.
- xenocratus 6y ago
  This reminds me of the timeless quote: > Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should. You can take that either way :)
- imtringued 6y ago
  You can just start up Eclipse or Visual Studio (the original) and have the exact same experience. That's how I started with Java and zero Linux knowledge. What you are really complaining about is the fact that nobody is there to shout in your face that these options exist.
  - user-the-name 6y ago
    Can you do that for node.js, like the person in the linked article wants to use?

m1gu3l 6y ago

How? It seems like you and the author are at the same energy level of complaining without putting up real ideas. How would you “fix” programming then?

krageon 6y ago

The problem isn't the user-friendliness of the tools (many very friendly tools exist), it's the amount of energy the author is willing to invest (approximately none). When exposed to truly trivial tooling, the problem becomes a lack of practice in the type of thinking that leads to good programs. There we see that the core of the issue why programming isn't "easy" is that it's just not. It takes practice to get computers to do what you want to do well and no matter what tools you use getting to know the tools will not even take 5% of the time that you need to get to a place where you do what you want. Furthermore, the clamoring that there is some sort of nefarious gatekeeping cabal keeping programming from being easy to whoever cares to shout about it is fundamentally dismissive of the actual effort and practice put in by people who used to have (but no longer have) this problem. Sometimes the answer is just that it's not trivial thing to do and this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. We don't think this of math, we don't think this of making good drawings or paintings.

macspoofing 6y ago
>We don't think this of math We do and we try every which way to make it 'natural' and 'easy', sometimes with vaunted social goals like stemming drop-out rates. The reality is, at some point, you just have to sit down, put your head down, and power through. Sometimes, like you alluded, there are no shortcuts. There are programming environments (sometimes even gamified) for learning, but if you want to use something to solve general purpose problems, you just have to learn it.
- krageon 6y ago
  Perhaps this is a cultural difference then, efforts to make math 'natural' and 'easy' are not something my secondary education had. You could either do it or you could not and if you could not you were put in a class that had basically no math (or just some very simple math if you picked economics).
kortex 6y ago
> ... it's the amount of energy the author is willing to invest (approximately none). When exposed to truly trivial tooling, the problem becomes a lack of practice in the type of thinking that leads to good programs. There we see that the core of the issue why programming isn't "easy" is that it's just not. If PATH and installing python is a struggle for them, hoo boy, no wonder they don't feel like part of the "code club". I merely type into my favorite search bar with auto complete "make sure /u" And I get: "make sure /usr/local/bin is in your $path" And top result is a SO spelling out what this message means and how to check. Engineering, of any discipline, is the sum of three phases: domain research, applying that knowledge to build something, testing that thing you built. With experience, you spend less time on 1 and more on 2, but with learning software, you spend the lion's share in 1. We still need to lower the barriers to entry. That involves teaching heuristics on how to solve problems.

pcthrowaway 6y ago

> The author is 100% correct on everything. The author is certainly correct on some things, but makes no good argument for why node.js should run in the Browser. I'm not even clear he understands what node is, or what he would gain from being able to use it in the browser, when it can already run Javascript just fine as is. No, Google should stop the show and bring node.js to his browser because he can't be bothered to go to Google to look up what a PATH is. I'm not saying programming can't be much more user-friendly; it certainly can be and should. Heck, maybe Chrome would do well to ship with a lightweight IDE to edit code in outside of the console. But the author hasn't listed a reason node.js has a place in Chrome natively, and is going on to claim they should. Talk about entitlement.

xenocratus 6y ago
It's by no means an IDE, but Chrome does have Workspaces: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/workspaces https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/work... . In any case, I remember using this (or something similar that maybe I forgot?) when I was doing frontend work, it was quite neat, especially if you had a local server recompiling things as you made changes.
imtringued 6y ago
There are tools that do what he wants but they are not node.js. That's the problem. The insistence on a specific tool and the desire that the entire world changes to accommodate you instead of just picking a different tool that does what you want.

grumple 6y ago

> Programming can and should be much, much more user friendly than it is now. For what sort of users? It's clear a number of people here consider the command line difficult. I do not. There are many tools that make simple tasks very simple. I use it for manipulating tab files. I can pipe data through scripts and back through command line utilities, pipe it directly into a database, or do the reverse. It's very simple, and very powerful. Just because you don't understand it or aren't familiar with it doesn't mean it isn't simple, powerful, and user friendly. Most programming languages are very simple. a = 1, b = 2, if a+b > 2, doSomething(). You can't actually make the logic simpler than that - this is why visual programming fails. It's still programming, but it turns out a limited visual/gui tool to do these logical operations is much harder to manage and work with than actual code.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
> For what sort of users? It's clear a number of people here consider the command line difficult. I do not. There are many tools that make simple tasks very simple. I use it for manipulating tab files. I can pipe data through scripts and back through command line utilities, pipe it directly into a database, or do the reverse. It's very simple, and very powerful. Consider all the things you've committed to memory that you've had to learn to do those things: all the archaic command names, all the one-letter switches, all the unreadable awk lines to re-jigger the formatting between tools, all the gotchyas and edge-cases you had to deal with in your scripting language, etc.
- minkzilla 6y ago
  But in the long run knowing all that makes it easier. We could have some GUI for doing all those things but it would end up being a massive mess of buttons EVERYWHERE and endless menus. And maybe a nice wizard could be designed for the given example that you could check the boxes as you go and it would be easy to figure out the first time. But after 5 years of doing this same thing do you want to spend 2 minutes clicking through a wizard every time or do you want to have spent a little time learning some cryptic commands a couple years back and now you can type it out in 20 seconds. Or better yet you made a script and it takes 1 second to run ./processAndInsertToDevDb I think the point is that most programming tools aren’t made to be easy to use the first time. They’re made so that the 100th or 1000th time it’s fast even if every time it’s been a little different.

imtringued 6y ago

>Programmers tend to get very proud of the completely pointless knowledge they have to acquire to use the pointlessly complicated tools they do, and they confuse that with being clever. You need that knowledge to build production level applications. The problem is not that these tools are useless, but rather that the audience you are thinking of doesn't care about them. Instead of crapping on other's people's work just look for things that are actually suitable for your own needs instead of trying to one up the experts. >It's not. It's really not. Nothing has to be this esoteric and annoying. We've just chosen to keep things like this because we think it makes us clever. I'll be honest. I don't like people like you. You are making things harder for yourself. You have chosen to go down a difficult path and then you complain that the experts that need these difficult tools are stupid. Why? There are lots of easy to learn programming languages. You can start off with a very limited and restricted environment. Just fire up a google spreadsheet and start writing javascript if that is all you want. Don't complain that writing a production level web application is difficult because you need to know about complicated things like what a HTTP server is and why it has to run on port xyz and why everyone calls their own computer localhost. >Programming can and should be much, much more user friendly than it is now. It is so user friendly even kids can pick it up if their game supports modding. You're not looking hard enough. If someone were to hand you everything on a silver platter you would never learn on your own.

macspoofing 6y ago

>Programmers tend to get very proud of the completely pointless knowledge they have to acquire to use the pointlessly complicated tools they do, and they confuse that with being clever. Like what?

chme 6y ago

> The author is 100% correct on everything. Programming is massively over-complicated for no useful reason. I don't know of any developer that likes complexity for complexity sake for productive systems. I know there are some esoteric programming languages or obfuscation techniques that make simple things more complex, but they a either meant as a challenge for fun or efforts to protect IP. Do you have some examples where you have observed such design decisions?

z3t4 6y ago
I like to nominate frameworks for the complication category. People say they don't want to reinvent the wheel, but what they really mean is that they want to have the training wheel on.

iso1631 6y ago

> The author is 100% correct on everything. Programming is massively over-complicated for no useful reason. What are you trying to do? Say I'm Santa and have a list of names in "naughtynice.lst", in the format Joey Bloggs,train,nice Johnny Doe,car,naughty Mary Lamb,car,nice etc I can get my shopping list by simply creating a file on my machine my $i = 0; my $toys = {}; my $coal = 0; while (<>) { chomp; my ($name, $toy, $nice) = split(/,/); if ($nice eq "nice") { $toys->{$toy}++; } else { $coal = $coal++; } } print "$_: ".$toys->{$_}."\n" foreach keys (%{$toys}); print "coal: $coal\n"; and then typing perl test.pl naughtnice.lst to run it. Python I assume is similar. I'm fairly sure that OSX comes with perl, python and bash if nothing else. Now you could say that you don't like the syntax of perl, or python, or basic, or java, but actually knocking up a quick program and running is no harder than writing that same code in some hidden part of excel