Why do people faint at the sight of plain-text code?
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you just made me inadvertently realize that's exactly why AI will never take development jobs.
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They are very much aimed at humans.
Crafted to hurt humans, but still.
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Real programmers modulate their voice and scream precisely into the microphone such that the recorded audio file is valid machine code.
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I'm not looking for a solution, I want to gain empathy so I can be a better leader for my peers and followers. I want to understand how you get through life and what affects this thing that makes you diverse from me so that I can positively impact the people around me.
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I'm not looking for a solution, I want to gain empathy so I can be a better leader for my peers and followers. I want to understand how you get through life and what affects this thing that makes you diverse from me so that I can positively impact the people around me.
Oh ok
I'm not a professional in this, I'm afraid that I can't help you
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Exactly!
Literally everything we ever came up with is comprehensible by humans, and is likely to be comprehensible by a layman given enough time and making sure prerequisites are filled.
In fact, it takes a good explanation that would click with a given person's experience and level of expertise to make anyone understand anything.
It's just that sometimes people need that specific thing X, and normally it's needed to those who have some knowledge in another specific thing Y, and it gets expected that a person needing X knows Y (which is not necessarily true)
This is especially common in the world of computers. Everyone uses them, everyone has to troubleshoot them, but not everyone is the system administrator, to which 85% of the guides often seem to be addressed.
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Or Java?
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We're in x86 and we speak binary assembly in this architecture, goddammit.
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We're in x86 and we speak binary assembly in this architecture, goddammit.
Assembly is just a high level language for people without a hole puncher
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We're in x86 and we speak binary assembly in this architecture, goddammit.
And guess who X86 was designed for.
Yes. Humans.
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When AIs start actually coding, they're all going to just probably use the native instructions.
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Just give it three more months.
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Comment sections. How do they work?
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I like this only because it makes me feel like a wizard
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I've recently had to help the wife with some VRChat "Udon" language.
I mean I get it, all the stuff is like the underlying shit in a parser I wrote years ago to speed up execution. And looking up the name for that, it's an abstract syntax tree.
It's just I don't know why you would try to write stuff in it directly. All the tutorials have this mass of on screen spaghetti for "if a=45 then b.visible=false".
It's like everyone gets this idea that coding is hard and a bunch of text, and then they spit it out on screen so no none of us can understand it at first glance.
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Maybe I'm an old fogey, but I usually hear more pushback against visual languages as being too finicky to actually create anything with and I usually advocate for a blending of them, like working in Godot and having nodes to organize behaviour but written scripts to implement it.
I really appreciate the talks from Bret Victor, like Inventing on Principle (https://youtu.be/PUv66718DII), where he makes some great points about what sorts of things our tooling, in addition to the language, could do to offload some of the cognitive load while coding. I think it's a great direction to be thinking, where it's feasible anyways.
Also, one reason folks new to programming at least struggle with text code is that they don't have the patterns built up. When you're experienced and look at a block of code, you usually don't see each keyword, you see the concept. You see a list comprehension in Python and instantly go "Oh it's a filter", or you see a nested loop and go "Oh it's doing a row/column traversal of a 2d matrix". A newbie just sees symbols and keywords and pieces each one together individually.
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I've kinda noticed this block when working with non-developers attempting low-code and no-code platforms. Anecdotally, non-coders tend to assume that knowing how to code is the hard part of software development. It's really not though, there's tons of resources to learn any language you want for free, and cs students cover all of the basics in their first year. The hard part (well one of them) is knowing what to code: the data structures and algorithms. Pro_code, low-code, or no-code, there's just no way around not knowing how to design a working, efficient algorithm or a clean, scalable database schema. Ironically, for anything but the most trivial problems, the lack of maturity in low-code platforms tends to only make the algorithm harder to implement.
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i don't usually cross-post my comments but I think this one from a cross-post of this meme in programmerhumor is worth sharing here:
The statement in this meme is false. There are many programming languages which can be written by humans but which are intended primarily to be written by other programs (such as compilers for higher-level languages).
The distinction can sometimes be missed even by people who are successfully writing code in these languages; this comment from Jeffrey Friedl (author of the book Mastering Regular Expressions) stuck with me:
I’ve written full-fledged applications in PostScript – it can be done – but it’s important to remember that PostScript has been designed for machine-generated scripts. A human does not normally code in PostScript directly, but rather, they write a program in another language that produces PostScript to do what they want. (I realized this after having written said applications :-)) —Jeffrey
(there is a lot of fascinating history in that thread on his blog...)
