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People waiting for "the breakthrough" that suddenly makes programming easy and available to all are kidding themselves. As others have said there's inherent co
by richardjordan 13y ago
People waiting for "the breakthrough" that suddenly makes programming easy and available to all are kidding themselves. As others have said there's inherent complexity to programming and solving problems that can't be wished away with paradigm changing strategerized facilitations utilized by flow-optimized programmerators or whatever the secret code knowledge suppressed by scientists was prescribing.
On the broader point - and the comments by folks saying we should have made things better by now: we have. I started out learning to program with zero help, no tools, few manuals on an Apple II in some flavor of BASIC or machine code by trial and error.
Decades later having not coded a lick in more than 15 years I picked up Ruby On Rails quickly and easily (enough to get out MVP) and with the help of Stack Overflow and Google have spent the last three years getting better and better at it. I can do dramatically more today than I could have imagined in my days alone with an Apple II and a poor english translation of a poor chinese translation of a pirated Apple manual.
It's all better. The worst programmers have super powers available to them (they don't always use them admittedly) compared to prior days.
Things are getting better but they're earning it, not because "THEY" don't want you to know "SECRET KNOWLEDGE".
- melloclello 13y ago> People waiting for "the breakthrough" that suddenly makes programming easy and available to all are kidding themselves. As others have said there's inherent complexity to programming and solving problems that can't be wished away with paradigm changing strategerized facilitations utilized by flow-optimized programmerators or whatever the secret code knowledge suppressed by scientists was prescribing. I totally agree with you and would go so far as to say there's probably a kind of upper bound to the rate at which a human can translate an original idea in their head into an unambiguous logical construct of the kind which can be executed by a computer. However, I would also say that the narrowest bottleneck in this process is the rate at which someone can comprehend the current state and structure of a given program, and I would say that anything that tries to improve on the status quo of text files in a directory is pretty cool.
- Roboprog 13y agoI miss call trees. I used to have tools to generate call tree diagrams for procedural languages, back in the 80s. With virtual/dynamic methods, IDEs don't bother to try to make such a feature anymore.
- melloclello 13y agoSounds cool, do you think you could find an example? I googled for 'procedural call tree' but wasn't really certain what I was looking for.
- Roboprog 13y agosorry, is was over 20 years ago, and I forgot the name of the tool :-( It worked something like making a ctags/etags file (a list similar to the data an IDE uses for "find definition" jumps), and showing an indented list (removing any cycles in the call patterns) of the fan out, as if it were a tree (rather than a graph).