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Programming in the Mid-Future

88 replies on 6 pages. Most recent reply: Apr 11, 2010 5:47 PM by Charles McKnight

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Flat View: This topic has 88 replies on 6 pages [ « | 1 2 3 4 5 6 | » ]

Mike Ivanov

Posts: 23
Nickname: mikeivanov
Registered: Jul, 2007

Re: Programming in the Mid-Future

Posted: Mar 11, 2010 7:39 PM

Reply

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> how ... number of web servers/frameworks
> written in C++ is even relevant to the question at hand

Those are totally unrelated in an imaginary, ideal world where languages solve problems, not real people with deadlines and budget constraints ;-)

Mike Ivanov

Posts: 23
Nickname: mikeivanov
Registered: Jul, 2007

Re: Programming in the Mid-Future

Posted: Mar 11, 2010 7:45 PM

Reply

> Do you seriously mean ...
> time is dominated by typing "make"

Did I say that? I actually said "This is just one reason." -- of many others.

Of course, thinking and such is no less important and this where dynamic languages really shine. Especially thinking.

Mike Ivanov

Posts: 23
Nickname: mikeivanov
Registered: Jul, 2007

Re: Programming in the Mid-Future

Posted: Mar 11, 2010 7:49 PM

Reply

> Especially thinking.

Let me clarify that. Dynamic languages take less "mental energy" on doing the boilerplate stuff, leaving more time to spend on solving actual problems.

Cedric Beust

Posts: 140
Nickname: cbeust
Registered: Feb, 2004

Re: Programming in the Mid-Future

Posted: Mar 11, 2010 8:55 PM

Reply

> Dynamic languages take less "mental energy" on doing the
> boilerplate stuff, leaving more time to spend on
> solving actual problems.

Maybe when you are reading and writing your own code.

When you need to review or just understand code written by other people and you don't have any types to help you, I find that understanding that code is much more difficult than if it were written in a statically typed language.

Of course, there's also the fact that refactoring these languages is a lot more manual (and some automatic refactorings are actually impossible to perform), which is another aspect where they are less effective than statically typed languages.

--
Cedric

Kay Schluehr

Posts: 302
Nickname: schluehk
Registered: Jan, 2005

Re: Programming in the Mid-Future

Posted: Mar 11, 2010 10:14 PM

Reply

Here are my predictions:

1) static vs dynamic programming will capture the violent energy of political ideology and religion. Finally biologists explain the bias towards static/dynamic languages as being genetically determined.

2) Fundamentalist "Codd Cells" commit suicide attacks against NoSQL users who are hold for pigs and godless motherfuckers and the cause of all evil in the world.

3) The largest productivity boost ever happened in programming was due to the replacement of MS Word for the use of writing technical specifications by document types which were more programmers friendly. All of this started with a campaign initiated by the Chinese government which intended to beat the West in software engineering and identified its weakest points.

4) Videogame style programming never ever cut it for the typical introverted math guy who is used to text and clear thinking. However enduser plug'n play programming is mostly configuring and wiring components and it has replaced creative efforts by large.

5) During the last wave of collectivation former jobless professional programmers got cheap apartments with lots of electronic gadgets to play with for almost no costs. In return those postmodern peasants who couldn't sustain economically in the free and open sourced sofware world got involved into maoist "programming for the people" people comittees and had to work hard in large testing, refactoring and code migration projects.

Redmar Kerkhoff

Posts: 1
Nickname: rjkerkhoff
Registered: Mar, 2010

Re: Programming in the Mid-Future

Posted: Mar 12, 2010 3:33 AM

Reply

After reading your article, I think you should definitely check this paper out about the newspeak language which comes really close to what you've written.

http://bracha.org/newspeak-spec.pdf or the site of the language itself:

http://newspeaklanguage.org

Cheers!
Redmar Kerkhoff

robert young

Posts: 361
Nickname: funbunny
Registered: Sep, 2003

Re: Programming in the Mid-Future

Posted: Mar 12, 2010 6:30 AM

Reply

> 2) Fundamentalist "Codd Cells" commit suicide attacks
> against NoSQL users who are hold for pigs and godless
> motherfuckers and the cause of all evil in the world.

That's kind of like asserting that Newtonian physicists, who displaced the Aristotelians, would attack a cabal of neo-Aristotelians. In physics anyway, the practitioners know enough not to regress. Coders tend to have a loss of generational memory. I've always suspected this is due to university faculty looking pandering to the student body in order to gain high reviews. There is also the fact that the relational model has had two generations of faculty who willfully ignored it.

And yes, NoSql, and its adherents are the cause of all evil in the world, if evil means byte bloat, code bloat, and siloed applications. "You cannot possibly access my data without using my code, blasphemer!!!!! Arggg".

Mark Thornton

Posts: 275
Nickname: mthornton
Registered: Oct, 2005

Re: Programming in the Mid-Future

Posted: Mar 12, 2010 6:39 AM

Reply

> in order to gain high reviews. There is also the fact
> that the relational model has had two generations of
> faculty who willfully ignored it.
>

Perhaps also because the available products have serious shortcomings. Temporal modelling is still a work in progress. Achieving adequate performance on spatial data seems to require some deviation from normal relational principles.

George Sakkis

Posts: 14
Nickname: gsakkis
Registered: Jun, 2007

Re: Programming in the Mid-Future

Posted: Mar 12, 2010 8:54 AM

Reply

Mentioning Turing equivalence as an argument for "(language|type-system) X is no (better|worse) than (language|type-system) Y" is the Godwin’s Law corollary for programmers.

Mark Thornton

Posts: 275
Nickname: mthornton
Registered: Oct, 2005

Re: Programming in the Mid-Future

Posted: Mar 12, 2010 8:58 AM

Reply

> Mentioning Turing equivalence as an argument for
> "(language|type-system) X is no (better|worse) than
> (language|type-system) Y" is the Godwin’s Law corollary
> for programmers.

Turing is an appropriate response when the original says can't solve.

Kay Schluehr

Posts: 302
Nickname: schluehk
Registered: Jan, 2005

Re: Programming in the Mid-Future

Posted: Mar 12, 2010 9:32 AM

Reply

> Mentioning Turing equivalence as an argument for
> "(language|type-system) X is no (better|worse) than
> (language|type-system) Y" is the Godwin’s Law corollary
> for programmers.

In my experience mentioning Nazis or Turing equivalence has never stopped a discussion but quite the opposite. For that reason I consider Godwin´s Law as falsified.

Carson Gross

Posts: 153
Nickname: cgross
Registered: Oct, 2006

Re: Programming in the Mid-Future

Posted: Mar 12, 2010 9:49 AM

Reply

Cedric,

> So, can you (Bruce, actually) show an example of a problem
> that can't be solved in a statically typed language but
> can be solved in a dynamically typed one?

Here's one: write a solution to a problem in a dynamically typed language.

Other than that, I have a hard time thinking of one...

Cheers,
Carson

George Sakkis

Posts: 14
Nickname: gsakkis
Registered: Jun, 2007

Re: Programming in the Mid-Future

Posted: Mar 12, 2010 11:47 AM

Reply

> > Mentioning Turing equivalence as an argument for
> > "(language|type-system) X is no (better|worse) than
> > (language|type-system) Y" is the Godwin’s Law corollary
> > for programmers.
>
> Turing is an appropriate response when the original says
> can't solve.

Strictly speaking you are right, but I read it as "can't solve, at least without implementing on top of the static language an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a dynamic language" ;-)

Mike Ivanov

Posts: 23
Nickname: mikeivanov
Registered: Jul, 2007

Re: Programming in the Mid-Future

Posted: Mar 12, 2010 11:59 AM

Reply

> I have a hard time thinking of one

Carson, how about the very browser you've posted this comment with? :-)

I mean browser scripting. Is there a scarier nightmare than doing this kind of stuff in a strictly typed, compiled language?

Mike

Cedric Beust

Posts: 140
Nickname: cbeust
Registered: Feb, 2004

Re: Programming in the Mid-Future

Posted: Mar 12, 2010 12:11 PM

Reply

> > I have a hard time thinking of one
>
> Carson, how about the very browser you've posted this
> comment with? :-)
>
> I mean browser scripting. Is there a scarier nightmare
> than doing this kind of stuff in a strictly typed,
> compiled language?

Mike, you keep missing the point.

We're not debating whether it's easy or hard but whether it's possible.

Actually, we're not even debating any more: the initial claim ("can't solve") is clearly incorrect.

--
Cedric

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