4 ms·

> we've been promised a future where anyone could build software without learning to code When was that? All I remember is that it might have been a good scien

> we've been promised a future where anyone could build software without learning to code When was that? All I remember is that it might have been a good science-fiction story, or the promises of a few salesmen.

anonzzzies 2y ago
Been promised (and not only by salesmen), as far as I have been coding; in my case the early 80s, but my father was also a coder he also was promised that for even longer. The first time I went with him to a client (they didn't mind and I wanted to see the lovely Tandem Nonstop (II I think?) I was very young but I loved coding and this tech guy at that company (i think he was high up as he was allowed to touch everything in the server basement) showed the future; it was some DOS program where you just model your business logic with boxes and a<1 & b>3 etc and it would generate a all the code; he wasn't sales, they used it at that company to LoB apps. You didn't have to write a line. That was begin 80s. After that I have heard and seen this 1000s of times; no learning, just English and some business knowledge. Of course it never works and with AI, it still doesn't. But it's a nice dream; I would love a world with less code; humans and LLMs are not good at reasoning about logic.
lazide 2y ago
When people say ‘x wild thing was promised to us’, it’s almost always salesman doing the promising. It’s at least 50% of the job for many salesman. That and convincing the ‘target’ that they have the persons best interests in mind, and it will all work out great if they just sign on the dotted line/give them the money right now.
vacuity 2y ago
Also, why is "anyone [can] build software without learning to code" a desirable goal? Expanding the range of programmers, sure. Making programming easier for all programmers, sure. But what is the goal of allowing anyone to program? If we're talking ideals, economic stability is irrelevant. Not everyone wants to code, I think, and if they do, we don't need to lower barriers just for them. Why is programming different from any other craft? Sure, it's nice to be able to build a chair or table yourself. I could even say that everyone should know how to. But I'm not actually expecting everyone to learn it. It's good to know; maybe some day you will wish you knew it, but that's unlikely and not today. Isn't the whole point of building software so that people can get things done? Game engines have a lot of room for improvement, but should making a game take no programming ability? It would be nice if so, but it would take genuine AGI and then some.
- jfengel 2y ago
  As programmers we're middlemen. We are not domain experts in anything except the computer itself. People don't want programs; they want the things that programs do. For the moment, we're necessary middlemen. And we may even be necessary for a long time -- less for our skills at programming but for our experience in bridging the gaps between what users actually want, what they say, and what the computer can do. But most of the things that we prize in each other aren't really that important to the customer. They just want the tool to assist with their actual task, whatever it is. "No code" has never been anything like that. It's a buzzword that sells because that is indeed what people want, but it's fiction. Still, it's good to remember why it's such a desirable buzzword.
  - namaria 2y ago
    Middleman doesn't sit right we me. We're not interposing ourselves and imposing the need to go through us. People have wished to do away with computer code specialists ever since they found out computers could do things for them. But what make computers useful - their ability to be very exact and to do a lot (and I mean A LOT) of very exact things very quickly is the magic. You can't wish for very complex things done in a very exacting way but not needing to be exact yourself. You can hire people to do that for you. But thinking that you can somehow get a computer to be very fast and very exact for you without needing other people to go through the effort of being very exact about thoughts and language is just magical thinking. Software that can make software will be more complex than the software it makes and will necessitate more people to have exact thoughts and conversations and writings, not less.
    - jfengel 2y ago
      I take your point, and I concur. I picked "middlemen" to highlight some assumptions we make about ourselves, that the programs exist for their own purpose and not as means to an end. But you're correct that this is a necessary thing, not something that we've captured. At our best, we do exactly what you say: take things that people say and make them more concrete and specific. This is something I think a lot of programmers don't realize: it is fundamentally a human job. We are "in the middle" between the people (with their vague, hazy ideas) and the computer (with its very simplistic binary model of the world). When we think that our jobs are all about computers, we're setting ourselves up to be replaced. Not by AI, but by plain old software written once and then left there.
aaronbaugher 2y ago
Yeah, Salesforce dangles that hook to sell to managers who dream of a day without developers, but it's not happening. Funny thing is, I think in the 80s, with computers like the Commodore 64 and BASIC, anyone with some aptitude really could learn to do some programming. You didn't have higher-level concepts or much abstraction, just global variables, loops, and screen manipulation. The average person couldn't do a lot, but you could have some fun making shapes move around the screen, or write a little program to catalog your albums or something. Ironically, as computers and languages have gotten more powerful, they've also gotten harder to program, requiring a more specialized sort of mind to understand what's going on with more abstractions packed into less code.

anonzzzies 2y ago

Been promised (and not only by salesmen), as far as I have been coding; in my case the early 80s, but my father was also a coder he also was promised that for even longer. The first time I went with him to a client (they didn't mind and I wanted to see the lovely Tandem Nonstop (II I think?) I was very young but I loved coding and this tech guy at that company (i think he was high up as he was allowed to touch everything in the server basement) showed the future; it was some DOS program where you just model your business logic with boxes and a<1 & b>3 etc and it would generate a all the code; he wasn't sales, they used it at that company to LoB apps. You didn't have to write a line. That was begin 80s. After that I have heard and seen this 1000s of times; no learning, just English and some business knowledge. Of course it never works and with AI, it still doesn't. But it's a nice dream; I would love a world with less code; humans and LLMs are not good at reasoning about logic.

lazide 2y ago

When people say ‘x wild thing was promised to us’, it’s almost always salesman doing the promising. It’s at least 50% of the job for many salesman. That and convincing the ‘target’ that they have the persons best interests in mind, and it will all work out great if they just sign on the dotted line/give them the money right now.

vacuity 2y ago

Also, why is "anyone [can] build software without learning to code" a desirable goal? Expanding the range of programmers, sure. Making programming easier for all programmers, sure. But what is the goal of allowing anyone to program? If we're talking ideals, economic stability is irrelevant. Not everyone wants to code, I think, and if they do, we don't need to lower barriers just for them. Why is programming different from any other craft? Sure, it's nice to be able to build a chair or table yourself. I could even say that everyone should know how to. But I'm not actually expecting everyone to learn it. It's good to know; maybe some day you will wish you knew it, but that's unlikely and not today. Isn't the whole point of building software so that people can get things done? Game engines have a lot of room for improvement, but should making a game take no programming ability? It would be nice if so, but it would take genuine AGI and then some.

jfengel 2y ago
As programmers we're middlemen. We are not domain experts in anything except the computer itself. People don't want programs; they want the things that programs do. For the moment, we're necessary middlemen. And we may even be necessary for a long time -- less for our skills at programming but for our experience in bridging the gaps between what users actually want, what they say, and what the computer can do. But most of the things that we prize in each other aren't really that important to the customer. They just want the tool to assist with their actual task, whatever it is. "No code" has never been anything like that. It's a buzzword that sells because that is indeed what people want, but it's fiction. Still, it's good to remember why it's such a desirable buzzword.
- namaria 2y ago
  Middleman doesn't sit right we me. We're not interposing ourselves and imposing the need to go through us. People have wished to do away with computer code specialists ever since they found out computers could do things for them. But what make computers useful - their ability to be very exact and to do a lot (and I mean A LOT) of very exact things very quickly is the magic. You can't wish for very complex things done in a very exacting way but not needing to be exact yourself. You can hire people to do that for you. But thinking that you can somehow get a computer to be very fast and very exact for you without needing other people to go through the effort of being very exact about thoughts and language is just magical thinking. Software that can make software will be more complex than the software it makes and will necessitate more people to have exact thoughts and conversations and writings, not less.
  - jfengel 2y ago
    I take your point, and I concur. I picked "middlemen" to highlight some assumptions we make about ourselves, that the programs exist for their own purpose and not as means to an end. But you're correct that this is a necessary thing, not something that we've captured. At our best, we do exactly what you say: take things that people say and make them more concrete and specific. This is something I think a lot of programmers don't realize: it is fundamentally a human job. We are "in the middle" between the people (with their vague, hazy ideas) and the computer (with its very simplistic binary model of the world). When we think that our jobs are all about computers, we're setting ourselves up to be replaced. Not by AI, but by plain old software written once and then left there.

aaronbaugher 2y ago

Yeah, Salesforce dangles that hook to sell to managers who dream of a day without developers, but it's not happening. Funny thing is, I think in the 80s, with computers like the Commodore 64 and BASIC, anyone with some aptitude really could learn to do some programming. You didn't have higher-level concepts or much abstraction, just global variables, loops, and screen manipulation. The average person couldn't do a lot, but you could have some fun making shapes move around the screen, or write a little program to catalog your albums or something. Ironically, as computers and languages have gotten more powerful, they've also gotten harder to program, requiring a more specialized sort of mind to understand what's going on with more abstractions packed into less code.