memes

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 generated 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...)

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 actually 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.

Though perhaps when AIs start actually coding, they're all going to just probably use the native instructions. Because why not?

A lot of people really have difficulty with maths and programming.

The way i imagine it, programming is something non-real, something metaphysical, or how you want to call it. And a lot of people even plainly reject that such a thing meaningfully exists. Think about how many people reject the existence of "spirits", "demons", or "god", based on nothing else but the argument that it is not tangible. Something similar is going on with maths and programming.

I think it's "learned helplessness", sadly. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

Like much of math, people are often eager to talk about the cool stuff and make it sound hard because they are proud they understood it. For a newcomer, this is just a brick in the face.

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.

It took me looking at unfamiliar programming languages and realizing that I could read most of them without really knowing them for me to realize I probably could learn to at least read another language.

It's been years since then and I'm still probably shit at Spanish, but just like programming languages regular languages were made by humans to communicate with other humans, you're capable of understanding any of them given a reasonable amount of time and guidance.

What is non-plain-tezxt code?

Programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute

We're in x86 and we speak binary assembly in this architecture, goddammit.

It's a balancing act between made for humans and made for optimization.

Because humans left with their own devices write shit code.

For me, I think it's that most common-language things that I happen to look at are 500-line+ with non-obvious short names (initialisms? might be an issue with low-level). Some of it might be down to optimization or language features/requirements, or not using libraries. Though I also don't hate whitespace so it may just be my brain.

The other side of the coin is that interpreted languages (being more readable) are slower(+single-threaded) and have other limitations/issues. I have some hope that Python's update with JIT and no-GIL may change that, but integrating it into other tools is still an issue so I haven't looked into it.

The one language that has clicked for me is Nim-lang (compiles-to-C, interop). I haven't done enough real projects, but I like the syntactic sugar and UFCS. Not sure if that's the best way to say it, but it's like the options that exist can be used to make code more concise. Something that seems small like how you can write conditions or loops can make a big difference.

All programming languages claim to be for humans. Doesn't make them good at it.

Counterexample.

i don't think brainfuck or ook are actually meant for humans. more like against humans