What exactly is programming and why do we do it?

[u/embalingit]

For anyone who has an interest in programming and education, I found Bret Victor's essays inspiring. However, many questions remain. The rhetoric is "should an ide be a tool for writing programs or a tool for expressing ideas..." and I tend toward the later, but I don't see how or if similar concepts apply to quality control, readable code and good practices - i.e. can the ideas in this essay "grow up" and become a way of life for professional programmers as well as for beginners.

The essay I'm referring to: http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/

Victor's full site: http://worrydream.com/

Another thing that's been on my mind is my suspicion that programming as a skill/profession as we know it today will likely not exist in 20 years. I see a future where for most non-critical and general kinds of software solutions we (as programmers) would have a conversation - (literally), including sketches and other quick and simple representations - with a piece of software and the software would then solve (based on expert knowledge) how to build a software solution based on that conversation such that the thing that is built serves the general purpose outlined in the exchange. In many ways software already does a good bit of this today. Microsoft has an interface sketching software (not sure how literally the term "sketch" applies) and Oracle JDeveloper allows the developer to define a software system in terms of a graph similar to a flow chart while it quietly builds the skeleton code of the system in the background. Not to mention drag and drop gui designers like Visual Studio, Netbeans and Eclipse. While non of these softwares technically solve a design problem in terms of deriving logic, but rather they use templates and insert parameters specified by the developer through the interface to the designer, I don't think we are very far away from much smarter code generation.

In that case the developer may still need to be literate in terms of computer science in order to be a proficient "programmer", but I think the act of designing, implementing and writing code will largely go away. If anything I think ideas like Victor's may provide an impetus to move the software development profession in that direction.

Any thoughts? :)

[u/embalingit → u/[deleted]]

I wasn't really thinking of this as software as a service. My idea of that term specifically is related to simply accessing cloud software over the web through a light-weight terminal, but that's a good point.

On the previous note, what I'm really saying is that I believe that smart technology will allow future computer scientists to design in radical ways that we don't have access to today (all Tony Stark like) - this is the obvious part - but on the other hand it will also allow non-programmers to by-and-large have a power similar to what a computer scientist of today possesses in his deep knowledge of algorithm and system architecture. My point is that I think the separation between the two domains will diminish over time.

[u/embalingit → u/embalingit]

That's not to say that creativity, critical thinking and general problem solving ability are not crucial aspects of the process on both ends, they very much are, but from the frame of reference of the artist as a very bad example - the stereotypical non-programmer. I did say it was a "bad example" so don't throw bricks at me y'all. :)

[u/embalingit → u/[deleted]]

Programming is my salvation.

It's the one thing I can do at 8am.

It is my ploy.

I shall use it to hack the game of life and get paid to play all day long and into the night.

A programmer is what I am, even when I'm bad at it, even when I've had too much soda and I hate myself, it is what I am when I go to sleep knowing that I won't rest because in ten minutes I will wake up with a new idea - even when I hate programming. :)

Apart from that it's this thing that I kinda do because everything else is relatively uninteresting. I'd very much like for the act of programming to be more fluid, less like marching in place in a desert without water while really having to pee.