2 ms·

I've come to the same conclusion and wrote a series of posts on it a few months back: http://zackarymorris.tumblr.com/post/10973087527/the-state-of-the-art-is-

I've come to the same conclusion and wrote a series of posts on it a few months back: http://zackarymorris.tumblr.com/post/10973087527/the-state-of-the-art-is-terrible http://zackarymorris.tumblr.com/post/10973087527/the-state-o... I'm thinking that if you chop a program up into many small pieces, each part is simple enough that it can easily be solved by the compiler with something like genetic programming (or better yet, methods in languages like Prolog that already work for small problems). So much of what we work on now is a waste of time (I'd say well over 90%), things like syntax errors, makefiles, DLL hell, code repo weirdness, managing web servers, concurrent programming, just on an on and on, that I gave up on working on real problems over a decade ago (the kind we learn in school in lisp/Matlab/Mathematica etc). I would really like to write an entire program sometime as a big tree, that would be convertable back and forth to something simple like JSON. Then the compiler would go through and convert my simple statements like "when this sprite touches this sprite, give them opposite speeds) into the underlying code so I don't have to waste my time with it. I know we think that we work on more complex stuff than that, but I think if most programmers audit their time, they'll find that very little of it goes into the mathematics of solving problems (10%). I realize the logic may not be solved anytime soon, but maybe the minutia can be. If we don't obsess on finding the perfect algorithms, but allow ourselves a floor of say O( n^2 ), I think our productivity could go up substantially. Maybe it's time for a bunch of geeks like us to be willing to unlearn what we have learned, basically scrap everything, and try working backwards from what the solution will look like (what people will be using in a few decades).

gintas 15y ago
> I would really like to write an entire program sometime as a big tree, that would be convertable back and forth to something simple like JSON. That would be Lisp. > convert my simple statements like "when this sprite touches this sprite, give them opposite speeds) into the underlying code so I don't have to waste my time with it. That's function application (if at runtime) or macro expansion (if at compile time).
- zackmorris 15y ago
  Ya but both of those don't work in the real world, at least not very well (or beginners would be able to use them). I'm not trying to be negative, just pointing out that existing options are not living up to expectations. I think I'm talking more about readability than sophistication. I want to write in a high level language like Hypertalk (from the HyperCard days) and let the compiler create a series of permutations under the hood that I could review and say "yes that one works, use it" and then maybe the compiler could annotate my code with more precise limits on what I said. So for example I tell it I want to sort a list, it shows me algorithms that sort numbers, strings and objects, and I say "yes strings are good enough" and it shows me the updated version of my code showing that it requires strings. I know that sounds a little weird but this is 90% of the minutiae that I deal with on a daily basis and I am thoroughly disgusted with how myopic and restrictive tools have become today. They break when I forget a semicolon, when I would much rather have them show me an edge case of my algorithm that is incorrect.
  - pnathan 15y ago
    Actually, Lisp works fine for beginners. It's simply not the current fad. I use Lisp by preference because it's so much easier to express my ideas without whacking on the syntax mole.

gintas 15y ago

> I would really like to write an entire program sometime as a big tree, that would be convertable back and forth to something simple like JSON. That would be Lisp. > convert my simple statements like "when this sprite touches this sprite, give them opposite speeds) into the underlying code so I don't have to waste my time with it. That's function application (if at runtime) or macro expansion (if at compile time).

zackmorris 15y ago
Ya but both of those don't work in the real world, at least not very well (or beginners would be able to use them). I'm not trying to be negative, just pointing out that existing options are not living up to expectations. I think I'm talking more about readability than sophistication. I want to write in a high level language like Hypertalk (from the HyperCard days) and let the compiler create a series of permutations under the hood that I could review and say "yes that one works, use it" and then maybe the compiler could annotate my code with more precise limits on what I said. So for example I tell it I want to sort a list, it shows me algorithms that sort numbers, strings and objects, and I say "yes strings are good enough" and it shows me the updated version of my code showing that it requires strings. I know that sounds a little weird but this is 90% of the minutiae that I deal with on a daily basis and I am thoroughly disgusted with how myopic and restrictive tools have become today. They break when I forget a semicolon, when I would much rather have them show me an edge case of my algorithm that is incorrect.
- pnathan 15y ago
  Actually, Lisp works fine for beginners. It's simply not the current fad. I use Lisp by preference because it's so much easier to express my ideas without whacking on the syntax mole.