5 ms·

Agreed completely. Today there's such a large disconnect between how you think about software (APIs, services, systems, data flows, replication, data storage, a

by eandre 5y ago

Agreed completely. Today there's such a large disconnect between how you think about software (APIs, services, systems, data flows, replication, data storage, access patterns, and so on) and how you actually develop software, with plain text files on disk that don't at all resemble our mental model. I've been working on a new type of framework that is about making how we develop software match this mental model. Where the higher-level primitives we think in terms of are first-class citizens at the language level. I think only then is it possible to reason about, and scale, software in a much more productive and effective way.

zmmmmm 5y ago
> Today there's such a large disconnect between how you think about software (APIs, services, systems, data flows, replication, data storage, access patterns, and so on) and how you actually develop software, with plain text files on disk I view this a little differently. People have tried again and again to move the abstraction layer for coding above text files. This was happening back in the 90's (in the guise of so-called "4GLs" [0]) and still today (now rebranded as "no-code" [1]). I myself spent a good deal of effort trying to code "diagramatically" through top down UML (with an amazing product for it's time, Together). So the ambition to shift programming up the abstraction food chain has been tried continuously for 30 years and continued to fail every time. Eventually I changed my view and decided that there were fundamental reasons why higher level abstractions don't work - software is just too complex, the abstractions are too leaky. The details matter, they are critically important. We are in a long arc of figuring out the right abstractions that may take a century or more and in the meantime, we simply have to have the flexibility of text based formats to let us express the complexity we need to manage in the meantime. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_... [1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/26/the-no-code-generation-is-arriving/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/26/the-no-code-generation-is-...
- eandre 5y ago
  I don't disagree,but I think there's space for several levels of abstraction between where we are today and no-code tools.

by eandre 5y ago

zmmmmm 5y ago

> Today there's such a large disconnect between how you think about software (APIs, services, systems, data flows, replication, data storage, access patterns, and so on) and how you actually develop software, with plain text files on disk I view this a little differently. People have tried again and again to move the abstraction layer for coding above text files. This was happening back in the 90's (in the guise of so-called "4GLs" [0]) and still today (now rebranded as "no-code" [1]). I myself spent a good deal of effort trying to code "diagramatically" through top down UML (with an amazing product for it's time, Together). So the ambition to shift programming up the abstraction food chain has been tried continuously for 30 years and continued to fail every time. Eventually I changed my view and decided that there were fundamental reasons why higher level abstractions don't work - software is just too complex, the abstractions are too leaky. The details matter, they are critically important. We are in a long arc of figuring out the right abstractions that may take a century or more and in the meantime, we simply have to have the flexibility of text based formats to let us express the complexity we need to manage in the meantime. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_... [1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/26/the-no-code-generation-is-arriving/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/26/the-no-code-generation-is-...

eandre 5y ago
I don't disagree,but I think there's space for several levels of abstraction between where we are today and no-code tools.