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I like to envision something like 'augmented coding', where the concepts are driven by the programmer, and some friendly bot fills in the nitty gritty. I'm not

I like to envision something like 'augmented coding', where the concepts are driven by the programmer, and some friendly bot fills in the nitty gritty. I'm not talking about something like a GUI driven language, more like autocomplete - just that the autocomplete is doing way more than calling up a list of method names.

arethuza 14y ago
Something like a Lisp macro but including user (i.e. developer) interaction? On seconds thoughts - that sounds a bit too much like a Visual Studio wizard/template.
eru 14y ago
Stronger static typing could help with that a bit. After all, if you have powerful types the auto-complete could help more. Also, if you have relatively easy types and building blocks, there are only a few functions of that type that are also simple.
akkartik 14y ago
Charles Simonyi proposed doing this with human bots in his thesis back in 1976: http://www.parc.com/content/attachments/meta-programming-csl-76-7.pdf http://www.parc.com/content/attachments/meta-programming-csl... Seldom have I encountered a book that made me want to throw it at the wall. Wrong, wrong, wrong, but everybody should read it.
guard-of-terra 14y ago
Why not make bot a function and just call it in your code? There are things like this, for example, scaffolding in rails.
Zak 14y ago
In a sense, that's what a good optimizing compiler is. You were probably thinking of something more abstract, but I submit that the difference is more quantitative than qualitative. We already have the kind of thing you want; you just want a better one.
seanmcdirmid 14y ago
Sounds like AI and maybe machine learning. Once we get to that point though, why do we need a person telling the bog what to do?
- VLM 14y ago
  If you don't intentionally give it a god, repeated experimental evidence is it'll invent (at least) one for itself, so you'd best keep in the loop, unless you really trust evolution or don't really care what happens.
nathan_long 14y ago
I don't understand. When I say, in Ruby, `"hello".upcase`, I'd say I'm expressing a concept, and a whole lot of nitty gritty - memory allocation, object instantiation, method lookup, etc, is being "filled in" for me. This works because the code I type still expresses exactly what I want. The thing the computer can't do for me is specify exactly what I want. Are you looking for more of the same, or some "guess what I want"?
aidenn0 14y ago
Yes; we would first need some unambiguous way of communicating with the IDE what we want it to do, and we'll call that a "programming language"
sultezdukes 14y ago
Hate to say it, but....."Clippy" in your IDEs, but way, way better. Or to give more detail, "intelligent" agents that know some things about your domain, rather than just the language like we have now with Intellij, Resharper, etc.. And I still think what Simonyi and crew are doing over at http://www.intentsoft.com/ http://www.intentsoft.com/ is the future of development, even if their specific products never make it into the mainstream

arethuza 14y ago

Something like a Lisp macro but including user (i.e. developer) interaction? On seconds thoughts - that sounds a bit too much like a Visual Studio wizard/template.

eru 14y ago

Stronger static typing could help with that a bit. After all, if you have powerful types the auto-complete could help more. Also, if you have relatively easy types and building blocks, there are only a few functions of that type that are also simple.

akkartik 14y ago

Charles Simonyi proposed doing this with human bots in his thesis back in 1976: http://www.parc.com/content/attachments/meta-programming-csl-76-7.pdf http://www.parc.com/content/attachments/meta-programming-csl... Seldom have I encountered a book that made me want to throw it at the wall. Wrong, wrong, wrong, but everybody should read it.

guard-of-terra 14y ago

Why not make bot a function and just call it in your code? There are things like this, for example, scaffolding in rails.

Zak 14y ago

In a sense, that's what a good optimizing compiler is. You were probably thinking of something more abstract, but I submit that the difference is more quantitative than qualitative. We already have the kind of thing you want; you just want a better one.

seanmcdirmid 14y ago

Sounds like AI and maybe machine learning. Once we get to that point though, why do we need a person telling the bog what to do?

VLM 14y ago
If you don't intentionally give it a god, repeated experimental evidence is it'll invent (at least) one for itself, so you'd best keep in the loop, unless you really trust evolution or don't really care what happens.

nathan_long 14y ago

I don't understand. When I say, in Ruby, `"hello".upcase`, I'd say I'm expressing a concept, and a whole lot of nitty gritty - memory allocation, object instantiation, method lookup, etc, is being "filled in" for me. This works because the code I type still expresses exactly what I want. The thing the computer can't do for me is specify exactly what I want. Are you looking for more of the same, or some "guess what I want"?

aidenn0 14y ago

Yes; we would first need some unambiguous way of communicating with the IDE what we want it to do, and we'll call that a "programming language"

sultezdukes 14y ago

Hate to say it, but....."Clippy" in your IDEs, but way, way better. Or to give more detail, "intelligent" agents that know some things about your domain, rather than just the language like we have now with Intellij, Resharper, etc.. And I still think what Simonyi and crew are doing over at http://www.intentsoft.com/ http://www.intentsoft.com/ is the future of development, even if their specific products never make it into the mainstream