Ask HN: Can programming be less about tuning and more about playing? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can programming be less about tuning and more about playing?

10 pointsjulienreszka10 comments

When I compare with a musical instrument, I feel like computer programming is too much about tuning and not enough about playing.

I wish it was more reactive, less dull.

For now brain computer interfaces are still science fiction so...

Do you know of any piece of technology that exists today, that would help create more playfully with the computer ?

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Yes that technology is called Common Lisp. You hack together whatever you want at the highest possible abstraction level, pluck out just what you changed, and play with it by hand to test it. No writing tests, no types, no complex syntax to learn, no limits on macros hackery, no guarantees anything will work either but you're likely just doing it for a hobby and not in a highly complex professional setting. I would imagine professional musicians also feel like they're doing too much tuning and not enough playing because it's work, and most of the material out there for programming is for/by people in the professional industry which is probably why you don't like it just like you wouldn't want to read professional music theory journals or studio engineering documentation.

You might find this talk by Brett Victor interesting: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII#

Thank you that was very interesting !

Maybe programming with my voice could be fun. Is anybody using this kind of stuff on a daily basis ? http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/using_voice_to_code.html

I always see the unit test lights turning green as 'points earned', is that the sort of thing you mean?

Unit testing seems a lot like tuning to me. There's usually a pretty straightforward definition of "correct" (A=440Hz...), but it's -- at best -- distantly related to the audience's experience of the performance.

Okay can you clarify your analogy - what is 'playing' in programming terms?

That's a great question, and I'll admit I find it easier to define in the negative than in the positive. And obviously, I'm not the original asker, so it would be interesting to hear their version as well.

For me, I think that a key difference might be one of "directness". That is, building things that directly relate to what the user experiences, rather than following processes which you have to trust will lead to the eventual creation of something enjoyable or valuable.

Paul Graham wrote something which, for me, does a pretty good job of capturing how things feel when you're working in this kind of way[1], and also explaining why there's an impedance mismatch between this and what larger organisations tend to be looking for.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/head.html

Which programming languages and IDEs have you used? Are they efficient at solving your problems or do you need pay tons on attention to every tiny detail?

I'm hinting towards functional programming ;)

If you want to play programs you need to became SRE or DevOps. Guys which run code in production. In resource-constrained environements programmers also run their code in production.

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