Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanI-S | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps the idea that code can only be read and manipulated by an educated intellectual minority seemed a revoltingly bourgeoisie concept to those in charge at the time.

View on HN

Most advanced visual programming systems I'm familiar with can't be properly read or manupulated by anyone except even tinier minority of people who specialize on working with the particular system.

That certainly seems to be the case, but I'm not sure that it was the intention.

Well, having worked with various 4GLs that were meant to improve productivity and produce re-usable code, ones that are being used merely add more accidental complexity rather than reduce it.

And a diagram (in such a 4GL) does not help when it has hundreds of decision nodes and the end-user (read: a human being) visual system can only deal with at most 10 nodes.

It is also very amusing when the executives finally realize how unnecessarily complex their order processing chain is.

yours is the answer to "why do people care about non-programmers controlling machines" not "why do people care about visual programming".

how do you solve the issue you point out? isn't using symbols to represent something machine-readable what a programming language already is?

I think the point is that programming languages fail even in that regard: Even if the syntax is simplistic and understanding is easy, writing code requires a deeper understanding both in terms of how to model things in code and how to conform to syntax ("Oh, I got 2 pages of unrelated errors because I forgot a semicolon"). Both problems don't exist when reading, but do exist when writing.

Since the dawn of computing, we've seen great increases in programming productivity as we've ramped up our level of abstraction. I'd assume that visual programming is attractive as it appears to be the next rung on this ladder. It may turn out to be a dead end, but people still try.

I'd argue that our next big jump in productivity is likely to come when we are able to have a conversation with an AI about the desired function of a program and have the AI write it for us. Whether visual programming will be a part of this conversation remains to be seen.

That seems extraordinarily unlikely, speech is var better at conveying abstraction than pictures (though pictures have a higher bandwidth).

http://catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/gui-programmer.html

Speech in conjunction with diagramming is more powerful than either alone. There's a reason most software companies' supply cupboards are stocked with dry-erase markers and notepads.

I'd be disappointed if our hypothetical AI was unable to grok simple diagrams or generate its own. If a conversation with this entity can still be called programming, I can definitely see it having a visual element.

No we haven't. What do we really have now that we didn't 30 years ago? A web browser is just an IBM 3270 at the end of the day. The boost in productivity is an illusion hidden behind ever more elaborate bells and whistles.

The boost in productivity will come when we stop reinventing the wheel every few years.

This is why computing has stagnated for 30 years http://programmers.stackexchange.com/q/58186/6219

Each new batch of programmers is so ignorant of the past that they spend all their time reinventing it (usually, badly) instead of making any real progress.

It won't happen. The essence of programming is having a vague description of a problem and figuring it out a way to solve it very, very precisely. This is just not a thing that can be done using AI. Any progress that has been made in AI is just the opposite: Put in a very precise question or description of the problem and you may get a vague answer.

Heck, if, even two decades from now we have some form of AI that just barely understands _existing_ code so that it can have at least a simple discussion with the programmer, I would be very surprised.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com