8 ms·

from the article > My hypothesis > Developers deal with two broad categories of work. > - Describing the logic of the problem they are solving using language

from the article > My hypothesis > Developers deal with two broad categories of work. > - Describing the logic of the problem they are solving using language constructs like if, loop, var etc. > - Working with computers to run those problems using constucts like $PATH, /var/tmp and AWS. > There are a lot of humans who can do the first work fine but don’t have the time to master the second category. I call these humans “makers”. the idea seems to be to make an end-user programming language for makers. makers want to make not ask ai to make, and they are capable of writing code, actually, it's just all the computer plumbing that's too much of a pain. a sophisticated programming language to write personal software that cuts out the computer plumbing would be something i'd love. i'm not fully clear how that would be done, but i like the thought.

tolciho 2mo ago
AppleScript "English" was designed to be intuitive and easy to understand (or so claimed various manuals), but boy howdy did I spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what "English" it did accept.
- pjmlp 2mo ago
  Nowadays it would be coupled with a LLM and be much flexible in what it could accept as English sentences.
Brian_K_White 2mo ago
500 million years ago a former colleague created "Electric File Clerk" which became profile which became filepro which technically still exists today. It was a "RAD, rapid application development system basically the proto ms access. The idea was the user is a dentist or lawyer, not a developer, but needs to make their own software because at that time almost no canned software existed yet. The doctor or florist or whatever could make their own database-backed application without writing a line of code. Just draw screens and define screens and fields and report formats. No language at all, since no code. We are talking trs-80 model I here...
- EvanAnderson 2mo ago
  Aside: I support a court who uses a FilePro-based application that dates back, at least, to the mid-90s. I don't have to deal with the actual app-- just the underlying Linux boxes that run it. It seems reasonable.
  - Brian_K_White 2mo ago
    In the filepro circles there is a famouse bit of history about a large user that once tried to migrate off of it, because obviously it's crap because it's ancient... and paid some shop to rewrite their existing filepro app in some current db framework, I think an oracle product but I don't remember, and they consumed some large amount of money and years, and in the end failed. The client sued the consultants and it actually went to trial and the lead developer of filepro at the time was called to testify as part of the whole thing. Point was just, this old thing is certainly old and not exactly natural to integrate with anything else today, but, there must be something there such that it does the job people actually need doing, and even spending millions of $ and many man-years on the most bestest-currentest-modernest-kool-kidsest systems somehow fails to deliver a equivalent actual real world functionality the users already had, let alone better. As magical as new frameworks undeniably are, there's always just something a bit out of touch, like they make the most sense to the developer of the framework and not the user of the framework.
    - EvanAnderson 2mo ago
      BTW, when you say "former colleague" are you referring to _the_ (non-fictional character) Howard Wolowitz? I don't much care for the show the namesake character was featured in, but between knowing the name from the lore of the TV show and being adjacent filePro I think it's pretty cool to actually talk to somebody who knew him.
      - Brian_K_White 2mo ago
        Yes but I didn't want to be like that, though of course the set of possible matches is so small that's silly but still... We worked at the same company writing software in filepro (well me doing all the sysadmin for the company as well as some fp dev) for about 20 years. I remember when he went on that trip. It's season 6 ep 4, The Re-Entry Minimization, the last few seconds. Both Howie's are in a diner. He is absolutely a character. I haven't talked to him in a few years because I left that company and we don't live near each other, and I am just a shitty friend that desn't call people, but I really love that man. At the 1st or 2nd xmas dinner when the company was small and we did such things, I had an HP Jornada pda that ran WinCE and I had managed to get a dos emulator running on it, with the dos version of fp in that, and I showed it to him, and he immediately closed that and went looking for porn on the device. (one of the main features of the device was simply the large color screen in the time of palm-v) He is the reason I finally learned to outgrow the very plain rural american diet I was raised on. He brought me to an Indian place he liked and suggested I try the falafel. I had only recently moved to NJ but had not yet appreciated the stupendous variety we enjoy in this area. All that weird stuff was just weird stuff. Becoming adventurous with food is a non-trivial change to you whole life. That one little thing is like a huge thing I can thank him for. Oh and he got me that job in the first place which ended up being rather big life change!
saghm 2mo ago
Didn't we invent the word "devops" specifically for the combination of work of development and ops? How did we get to the point where we now need a word for "development without the ops"?
- klez 2mo ago
  That's still not what this is about. Take the example in the article: people who don't write code 100% of the time but have to think about mechanical and electrical engineering consideration for most of the time. You don't describe that as DevOps.
  - saghm 2mo ago
    Sure, but that doesn't seem anywhere in the realm of "I need to know what's on my $PATH or how to set up a security group in AWS"
petra 2mo ago
// makers want to make not ask ai to make, It probably changes from person to person, some people are just interested in seeing how their idea comes to life and maybe does something useful in the world.
mamcx 2mo ago
The Op identify well the problem and the idea of the solution but the implementation is typically dev oriented. A good example of the actual tool is FoxPro and similar (even better than MS Access based on the ideals of the article) and I observed being actually used by occasional "developers" that need more than Access/Vb/Excel. I'm on the hunt for it with https://tablam.org https://tablam.org but the main major pain point is to bring the actual UI. You can go anywhere with syntax and such, is how you connect to the rest where the magic must prove is real.

tolciho 2mo ago

AppleScript "English" was designed to be intuitive and easy to understand (or so claimed various manuals), but boy howdy did I spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what "English" it did accept.

pjmlp 2mo ago
Nowadays it would be coupled with a LLM and be much flexible in what it could accept as English sentences.

Brian_K_White 2mo ago

500 million years ago a former colleague created "Electric File Clerk" which became profile which became filepro which technically still exists today. It was a "RAD, rapid application development system basically the proto ms access. The idea was the user is a dentist or lawyer, not a developer, but needs to make their own software because at that time almost no canned software existed yet. The doctor or florist or whatever could make their own database-backed application without writing a line of code. Just draw screens and define screens and fields and report formats. No language at all, since no code. We are talking trs-80 model I here...

EvanAnderson 2mo ago
Aside: I support a court who uses a FilePro-based application that dates back, at least, to the mid-90s. I don't have to deal with the actual app-- just the underlying Linux boxes that run it. It seems reasonable.
- Brian_K_White 2mo ago
  In the filepro circles there is a famouse bit of history about a large user that once tried to migrate off of it, because obviously it's crap because it's ancient... and paid some shop to rewrite their existing filepro app in some current db framework, I think an oracle product but I don't remember, and they consumed some large amount of money and years, and in the end failed. The client sued the consultants and it actually went to trial and the lead developer of filepro at the time was called to testify as part of the whole thing. Point was just, this old thing is certainly old and not exactly natural to integrate with anything else today, but, there must be something there such that it does the job people actually need doing, and even spending millions of $ and many man-years on the most bestest-currentest-modernest-kool-kidsest systems somehow fails to deliver a equivalent actual real world functionality the users already had, let alone better. As magical as new frameworks undeniably are, there's always just something a bit out of touch, like they make the most sense to the developer of the framework and not the user of the framework.
  - EvanAnderson 2mo ago
    BTW, when you say "former colleague" are you referring to _the_ (non-fictional character) Howard Wolowitz? I don't much care for the show the namesake character was featured in, but between knowing the name from the lore of the TV show and being adjacent filePro I think it's pretty cool to actually talk to somebody who knew him.
    - Brian_K_White 2mo ago
      Yes but I didn't want to be like that, though of course the set of possible matches is so small that's silly but still... We worked at the same company writing software in filepro (well me doing all the sysadmin for the company as well as some fp dev) for about 20 years. I remember when he went on that trip. It's season 6 ep 4, The Re-Entry Minimization, the last few seconds. Both Howie's are in a diner. He is absolutely a character. I haven't talked to him in a few years because I left that company and we don't live near each other, and I am just a shitty friend that desn't call people, but I really love that man. At the 1st or 2nd xmas dinner when the company was small and we did such things, I had an HP Jornada pda that ran WinCE and I had managed to get a dos emulator running on it, with the dos version of fp in that, and I showed it to him, and he immediately closed that and went looking for porn on the device. (one of the main features of the device was simply the large color screen in the time of palm-v) He is the reason I finally learned to outgrow the very plain rural american diet I was raised on. He brought me to an Indian place he liked and suggested I try the falafel. I had only recently moved to NJ but had not yet appreciated the stupendous variety we enjoy in this area. All that weird stuff was just weird stuff. Becoming adventurous with food is a non-trivial change to you whole life. That one little thing is like a huge thing I can thank him for. Oh and he got me that job in the first place which ended up being rather big life change!

saghm 2mo ago

Didn't we invent the word "devops" specifically for the combination of work of development and ops? How did we get to the point where we now need a word for "development without the ops"?

klez 2mo ago
That's still not what this is about. Take the example in the article: people who don't write code 100% of the time but have to think about mechanical and electrical engineering consideration for most of the time. You don't describe that as DevOps.
- saghm 2mo ago
  Sure, but that doesn't seem anywhere in the realm of "I need to know what's on my $PATH or how to set up a security group in AWS"

petra 2mo ago

// makers want to make not ask ai to make, It probably changes from person to person, some people are just interested in seeing how their idea comes to life and maybe does something useful in the world.

mamcx 2mo ago

The Op identify well the problem and the idea of the solution but the implementation is typically dev oriented. A good example of the actual tool is FoxPro and similar (even better than MS Access based on the ideals of the article) and I observed being actually used by occasional "developers" that need more than Access/Vb/Excel. I'm on the hunt for it with https://tablam.org https://tablam.org but the main major pain point is to bring the actual UI. You can go anywhere with syntax and such, is how you connect to the rest where the magic must prove is real.