Speaking as a Fancy Computer Science Professor at a Fancy Institution of Higher Education who teaches the course on Programming Languages:

Paul Cantrell

@wronglang
I stand by mine. It’s the only one that’s held up over my years in the biz.

Greg Whitehead

@inthehands fair enough, though teaching a dog a trick is about capturing behaviors and putting them on command, and then chaining those commands, which is more like programming than teaching in my book

Krzysztof Sakrejda

@inthehands I have gone through the exercise of trying to talk the chatgpt instance the university of Michigan makes available to its staff into terrible ethical positions and I gotta say it performed better (on, e.g.-Palestine) than a lot of the discourse in the mainstream news media so maybe there's some value to having a machine that produces average text... at least in the context of.. whatever we're experiencing right now...

Paul Cantrell

@grwster
I mean, maybe could one say that this kind of training — dogs, horses, soldiers, orchestral musicians, surgical assistants*, anything where you’re trying to teach a living creature to follow instructions with near-mechanical consistency — is teaching the student to be a machine, so that they can be “programmed” for the day’s task?

* (no disrespect to any of these roles / jobs, all demanding!)

Paul Cantrell

@wronglang ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If you’re looking for output that hews to norms, then it’s no surprise that pattern-matched plagiarism from a broad database of human inputs can provide it! And since that’s something that computers were recently bad at doing, then it does qualify as AI. For now.

Greg Whitehead

@inthehands orchestral scores / sheet music / guitar tabs, definitely programming… I’m a flawed machine when running those programs, but that’s not the programmer / composer’s fault

Paul Cantrell

@grwster
We're wandering now, but heck with it:

I have a whole soapbox about how we sometimes misinterpret musical scores as being programming when they’re not. There’s a whole spectrum of •how a score carries meaning• that depends on the types and degree of interpretive liberty the score affords within its musical-cultural context. Some scores are basically MIDI by other means; some are only the loosest framework for improvisation.

Paul Cantrell

@grwster The classical world I come from has IMO erred since the mid 20th century much to far toward seeing scores toward the “MIDI by other means” end of the spectrum, particularly with pre-20C music. I’m pretty sure that if we could hear a recording of, say, Chopin or Bach playing their own music, a modern classical musician’s immediate reaction would be “No! That's wrong!!”

Greg Whitehead

@inthehands point taken, but circling back to HTML, a certain amount of interpretation by the rendering engine is allowed… so, are programming languages by definition always tightly specified?

Oliver Jensen

@inthehands people like to think programming is while loops and if conditionals. I like to remind people of their programmable TV remotes.

"But that's not real programming" my brother you co-opted the word.

Paul Cantrell

@grwster
If so, then C is not a programming language!

padraigd

@wronglang @inthehands How your computer works under the hood is pretty wild. Branch prediction blew my mind, makes determinism an interesting notion.

RyeNCode

@inthehands @vkc
For me, it comes down to two questions:
A) does it have a syntax?
B) does it describe intended behavior within a computed system?

- Non credentialed senior developer

Paul Cantrell

@RyeNCode If you’ll allow (a) to be broad enough to include visual languages like MAX/MSP and Labview, and extend the “describe” of (b) to say that the description must be interpretable by a machine, then I think our definitions are pretty close.

Paul Cantrell

@padraigd @wronglang
Yeah, the “don't use abstractions” people really crack me up. Like…do you push electrons around by hand with a little pin?

RyeNCode

@inthehands
Light 3s of research...
Yes, obviously
Skimming MAX' wikipedia entry, the structure of the visual layout, linkage etc is all syntax. It's not textual, but so what?
Symbols and their representations and context all contribute to how a language can be interpreted by the receiver (in this case a computing system, such as a runtime, compiler or whatever)

Paul Cantrell

@RyeNCode
Agreed. I mentioned it because people get sticky about "syntax" sometimes.

datarama

@inthehands I used to draw the distinction between programming and not-programming exactly at Turing completeness.

Then I realized that this would imply that total functional languages are not programming languages, but Conway's Game of Life (or Minecraft) is. This is obviously silly.

arclight

@inthehands I understand what you're saying and I don't have any real argument - I just have a problem equivocating formatting to programming. Boldface, italics, type size, typeface, punctuation - all programming.

At some point it's not just gatekeeping - it's trying to give words actual meaning.

Writing Excel is programming - no argument. Fiber arts - weaving, knitting, crocheting - all programming.

What I get hung up on is that I expect programming to be defining an intentional sequence of commands above some arbitrary level of complexity. I know that's not satisfying but without some complexity threshold, pretty much any activity with some sort of physical manifestation is programming.

I don't argue with people about this because it's an unresolvable philosophical issue like "how much hair can you have and still be considered bald?" plus the accusations of gatekeeping. It's rarely a productive conversation. I don't find such an expansive definition of programming to be particularly useful.

Also: guys who abuse and harass women on the internet should not be allowed on the internet.

Paul Cantrell

@arclight Yes, of course there’s a continuum.

HTML that <i>merely</i> adds formatting markup to text is at most “little atoms of programming.” But modern HTML is hardly just that. The DOM, the box model, HTTP, forms, etc etc have intricacies that at this point are vast and overwhelming. And…

Per the point of the post you’re replying to: these things have surprising results. Human reader + machine reader + surprise = programming. And and…