3 ms·
> I'm sorry Bret, but Alan is right. You do need to be able to think like a machine. I would like to bring in another Alan Perlis quote: "You cannot move from
by pwang 14y ago
> I'm sorry Bret, but Alan is right. You do need to be able to think like a machine.
I would like to bring in another Alan Perlis quote: "You cannot move from the informal to the formal by formal means."
Programming is the art of formalizing things to a point where they are executable. Executable by what is the point of contention here. I think you are saying (and I somewhat agree) that ultimately your programs and ideas have to execute on a real machine, and as a programmer you need to understand and model that machine.
OTOH, perhaps what Bret is arguing is that we should make better machines and software abstractions.
- NickPollard 14y agoI dont think it needs to be a real machine in the sense of a physical one, just in the sense of an execution environment. What worries me about Bret's tools is that it looks like they make it easier for someone to produce something without knowing why. When you learn maths at school, you're normally taught to show your working - getting the answer isn't enough, you need to understand the process. Having so many sliders and timelines to pull around is fine, but at the end of the day we need to teach people functions and variables and recursion and combinators and so forth, and I'm not sure how one does that in this system. In a sense, it is skipping the architecture stage - working not just how to build, but what to build in the first place.
- jeremyjh 14y agoI really don't see that at all in what he's showed. Everything there is about helping people understand how and why the program is working.