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If you showed a 1970's person in my field what can be knocked together in R or in python today then they would be blown away. In that sense as more and more cod
by JupiterMoon 12y ago
If you showed a 1970's person in my field what can be knocked together in R or in python today then they would be blown away. In that sense as more and more code reuse through libraries happens the role of programming for the majority changes from low level difficult stuff to simply strapping bits together. I can see this trend continuing until we have a convergence of e.g. ipython and spreedsheets. In that sense everyone will become a programmer of sorts. But hardly anyone will be a 'real programmer'...
- jacquesm 12y agoNo, that 1970's person in your field would have likely shown you what they knocked together with APL and would blow you away. Not all of what we're doing can be termed progress, we're inventing a lot of stuff all over. Python is essentially a much better basic, there isn't much that I can do today in Python that I would not have been able to do in let's say Gfa Basic more than 2 decades ago. Our machines have gotten faster, our memories are much larger, and so are our drives. We take networking for granted. But our programming languages are only a very small step up from what we had back then and our ability to solve harder problems comes mostly from the faster hardware and the bigger ram, the drives and the network.