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Look, of course there's lots of unexplored territory in software engineering, and we absolutely should continue to strive for better programming languages and a
by feoren 4y ago
Look, of course there's lots of unexplored territory in software engineering, and we absolutely should continue to strive for better programming languages and abstractions. And we are! From reading this article, this author is looking in entirely the wrong direction for such improvements. It's not going to be some magic visual model that
One thing we should not expect is that new developments will be easy for us to learn, because we are already steeped in the current way of doing things. Supposedly, lexical scoping (what we're all familiar with) was extremely difficult to understand by early waves of programmers that were used to dynamic scoping (an insane way of doing it). They could have easily complained that this was just some new over-complicated abstraction and language construction that we don't need, but once you get over that hurdle and understand it, life actually becomes much simpler. New breakthroughs will hopefully be simple, but probably not very easy for us [1].
Many of this author's complaints about the current state of programming sound like they just haven't really achieved fluency in their programming language yet, and that they've been burned out on bad abstractions and have stopped trying to create (or just can't recognize) good ones. That's OK, this is all really hard to do! But it doesn't mean that everyone else is doing it wrong.
[1] https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/
- panstromek 4y ago> It's not going to be some magic visual model I wasn't talking about visual model at all. In fact, the word `visual` doesn't even appear in the article once.
- feoren 4y agoA fair point, and I can't remember what my point was going to be (perhaps I meant to delete this sentence). But on the other hand, you never talk about the alternative to plain text, and I think every alternative I've ever heard of has been "visual" in some sense. In fact I'm not sure what other options there are other than "visual" and "plain text". Perhaps what you were saying is that each developer should be able to choose whether they're working visually or in plain-text, with the underlying model being neither (binary? XML?). If you chose to work in LISP for the day, the computer would transpile the underlying model to LISP, and then transpile it back when you're done? I think this is the "magic" part, where some, what, AI does this for you? We're so far away from that being effective, and the benefits are just not there when you're truly fluent in the programming language. Every single instance I've ever seen of "Each developer can pick how it appears on their machine!" has made communication and synchronization between developers worse, not better.