3 ms·

determining what is to be built and precisely specifying it Interesting. What makes you think this is more difficult than writing code?

by p1esk 3y ago

bruce511 3y ago
It's not more difficult, assuming your language is precise enough. English is not ideal, it's too wordy and ambiguous. Computer languages exist, and we call them languages, because they allow you to write a specification each is complete, specific, and unambiguous. Since I began programming people have been showing the "next big thing", the thing that would allow "everyman" to program a computer. These approaches make it easier, but at the same time have to make decisions for you. They reduce edge cases by making the choices for you. The thing is, writing code is not the hard part. That part has gotten a lot easier over the years. I started out writing c in a plain text editor. We had no Internet, no Google search, no IDE, no color syntaxing, no auto complete, none of the other things a programmer today uses. AI is the next step along. It's good for small bits of raw code. The hard part of programing has not changed. Deciding what the program must do, in every possible circumstance, with every possible input. How to make something generically useful to lots of customers. How to cater for their differences while still maintaining a sane UI. The mistake the author of this thread makes is conflating -programing- with -code-. AI makes the act of typing code easier, it is the next step in a long, long line of tools to assist programmers. But fundamentally it doesn't move the needle, because fundamentally writing code is not the "hard part" of programming.
PaulHoule 3y ago
I wouldn't say it is more or less difficult, it is just a lot of work that somebody or something has to do. Just to take an example, that Excel clone is going to need a whole lot of icons which have to come from somewhere. If you're not picky about what they look like you can find some icon set like https://icons.getbootstrap.com/ https://icons.getbootstrap.com/ which I picked for my RSS reader because I am using Bootstrap CSS already which itself is a low-effort choice because I use Reactstrap at work. Somebody pickier could look at free and paid icon sets or hire a graphic designer which would involve a significant amount of talking about how you want it made. I am mainly a coder but my exact responsibilities have varied a lot from place to place. YOShInOn, my RSS reader and intelligent agent, is a one-man show which eliminates the overhead of communicating about things but means I don't get the benefit of other people's insight. I worked at an academic library where my first assignment was to take a very detailed Photoshop comp and make HTML that looked exactly like it. In other places nobody told me how it was supposed to look, or it was obvious from the get-go that I was supposed to add a new field to this form and it is going to have look like the rest of the form. I worked at a web development company where I worked on about 70 web sites in 8 months and we did projects very fast and cheap and forms that we made from scratch always followed a style guide we called "spider forms" which meant we could get better-than-average results without spending much time thinking. Where I work now I don't make decisions about the database schema except when I do, other places I was basically a DBA. So the point is a "coder" can have varying levels of responsibility for UX, business rules: they can get very vague descriptions of what it supposed to happen and they figure it out, or I can get very detailed storyboards for everything. One way or another a lot of design and planning work has to get done. A "low code" or "no code" system, whatever technology it is based on, is going to have to have a lot of decisions already made for you within some particular domain. Most of the worlds' business applications involve filling out forms and updating a database. But you might want a toolkit for making games that look like The Legend of Zelda with very little coding, or maybe something for making applications that put objects into your space with a Hololens or Apple Vision. You could bust out apps really quickly if you take the defaults in a domain but if you want to make something really special the sky is the limit for the talent involved. Take a look at the credits for a major video game for instance.

determining what is to be built and precisely specifying it Interesting. What makes you think this is more difficult than writing code?

by p1esk 3y ago

determining what is to be built and precisely specifying it Interesting. What makes you think this is more difficult than writing code?

bruce511 3y ago

It's not more difficult, assuming your language is precise enough. English is not ideal, it's too wordy and ambiguous. Computer languages exist, and we call them languages, because they allow you to write a specification each is complete, specific, and unambiguous. Since I began programming people have been showing the "next big thing", the thing that would allow "everyman" to program a computer. These approaches make it easier, but at the same time have to make decisions for you. They reduce edge cases by making the choices for you. The thing is, writing code is not the hard part. That part has gotten a lot easier over the years. I started out writing c in a plain text editor. We had no Internet, no Google search, no IDE, no color syntaxing, no auto complete, none of the other things a programmer today uses. AI is the next step along. It's good for small bits of raw code. The hard part of programing has not changed. Deciding what the program must do, in every possible circumstance, with every possible input. How to make something generically useful to lots of customers. How to cater for their differences while still maintaining a sane UI. The mistake the author of this thread makes is conflating -programing- with -code-. AI makes the act of typing code easier, it is the next step in a long, long line of tools to assist programmers. But fundamentally it doesn't move the needle, because fundamentally writing code is not the "hard part" of programming.

PaulHoule 3y ago

I wouldn't say it is more or less difficult, it is just a lot of work that somebody or something has to do. Just to take an example, that Excel clone is going to need a whole lot of icons which have to come from somewhere. If you're not picky about what they look like you can find some icon set like https://icons.getbootstrap.com/ https://icons.getbootstrap.com/ which I picked for my RSS reader because I am using Bootstrap CSS already which itself is a low-effort choice because I use Reactstrap at work. Somebody pickier could look at free and paid icon sets or hire a graphic designer which would involve a significant amount of talking about how you want it made. I am mainly a coder but my exact responsibilities have varied a lot from place to place. YOShInOn, my RSS reader and intelligent agent, is a one-man show which eliminates the overhead of communicating about things but means I don't get the benefit of other people's insight. I worked at an academic library where my first assignment was to take a very detailed Photoshop comp and make HTML that looked exactly like it. In other places nobody told me how it was supposed to look, or it was obvious from the get-go that I was supposed to add a new field to this form and it is going to have look like the rest of the form. I worked at a web development company where I worked on about 70 web sites in 8 months and we did projects very fast and cheap and forms that we made from scratch always followed a style guide we called "spider forms" which meant we could get better-than-average results without spending much time thinking. Where I work now I don't make decisions about the database schema except when I do, other places I was basically a DBA. So the point is a "coder" can have varying levels of responsibility for UX, business rules: they can get very vague descriptions of what it supposed to happen and they figure it out, or I can get very detailed storyboards for everything. One way or another a lot of design and planning work has to get done. A "low code" or "no code" system, whatever technology it is based on, is going to have to have a lot of decisions already made for you within some particular domain. Most of the worlds' business applications involve filling out forms and updating a database. But you might want a toolkit for making games that look like The Legend of Zelda with very little coding, or maybe something for making applications that put objects into your space with a Hololens or Apple Vision. You could bust out apps really quickly if you take the defaults in a domain but if you want to make something really special the sky is the limit for the talent involved. Take a look at the credits for a major video game for instance.