Toward Better Programming

An anonymous reader writes "Chris Granger, creator of the flexible, open source LightTable IDE, has written a thoughtful article about the nature of programming. For years, he's been trying to answer the question: What's wrong with programming? After working on his own IDE and discussing it with hundreds of other developers, here are his thoughts: 'If you look at much of the advances that have made it to the mainstream over the past 50 years, it turns out they largely increased our efficiency without really changing the act of programming. I think the reason why is something I hinted at in the very beginning of this post: it's all been reactionary and as a result we tend to only apply tactical fixes. As a matter of fact, almost every step we've taken fits cleanly into one of these buckets. We've made things better but we keep reaching local maxima because we assume that these things can somehow be addressed independently. ... The other day, I came to the conclusion that the act of writing software is actually antagonistic all on its own. Arcane languages, cryptic errors, mostly missing (or at best, scattered) documentation — it's like someone is deliberately trying to screw with you, sitting in some Truman Show-like control room pointing and laughing behind the scenes. At some level, it's masochistic, but we do it because it gives us an incredible opportunity to shape our world.'"

Comments

You think programming's bad?

[Anonymous Coward]

You think programming's bad? Think about electronics, especially analogue electronics.

Incomplete, inaccurate data sheets. Unlabeled diagrams (where's the electronics equivalent of the humble slashed single line comment?), with unknown parts given, and parts replaced with similarly numbered replacements with subtly different qualities. And then you've got manufacturing variances on top of that. Puzzling, disturbing, irreproducible, invisible failure modes of discrete components.

Programming is hard...

[hsthompson69]

...wear a fucking helmet.

The post essentially points in the direction of the various failed 4GL attempts of yore. Programming in complex symbolism to make things "easy" is essentially giving visual basic to someone without the knowledge enough to avoid O(n^2) algorithms.

Programming isn't hard because we made it so, it's hard because it is *intrinsically* hard. No amount of training wheels is going to make complex programming significantly easier.

We Choose Framentation Over Consolidation.

[scorp1us]

Let's look at the major programming environments of today:
1. Web
2a. Native Apps (machine languages (C/C++ etc))
2b. Native Apps (interpreted/JIT languages (intermediary byte code))
3, Mobile Apps

1. is made by 5 main technologies: XML, JavaScript, MIME, HTTP, CSS. To make it do anything you need another component, of no standard choice:your language of the server (PHP, Rails, .Net, Java, etc)
2. Was POSIX or Win32, then we got Java and .Net.
3. Is Java or Objective C.

We don't do things smart. There is no reason why web development needs to be 5 technologies all thrown together. We could reduce it all to Javascipt: JSON documents instead of XML/HTML, JSON instead of MIME, NodeJS servers, and even encode the transport in JSON as well.

Then look at native development. Java and .Net basically do the same thing. Which do what POSIX whas heading towards. Java was invented so Sun could keep selling SPARC chips, .Net came about because MS tried to extend Java and lost.

Then, we have the worst offenders. Mobile development. Not only did Apple impose a Objective-C requirement, but the frameworks aren't public. Android, the worst offender is a platform that can't even be used to develop native apps. At least Objective-C can. Why did Android go with Java if it's not portable? Because of some good requirement that they don't want to support a specific CPU, but then they go and break it so that you have to run Linux, but your GUI has to be Android's graphical stack. Not to mention that Android's constructs - Activities, Intents, etc are all Android specific. They don't solve new problems, they solve problems that Android made for themselves. We've had full-screen applications for years the same goes for theading, services, IO, etc.

I'm tired of reinventing the wheel. I've been programming professionally for 13 years now and Java was neat, .Net was the logical conclusion of it. I was hoping .Net would be the final implementation so that we could harness the collective programming power into one environment of best practices... a decade later we were still re-inventing the the wheel.

The answer I see Coming up is LLVM for languages. And Qt, a C++ toolkit. Qt runs everywhere worth running, and its one code base. Sure, I wish there was a java or .net implementation. But I'll deal with unmanaged memory if I can run one code base everywhere. That's all I want. Why does putting a text field on a screen via a web form have to be so different from putting a text box on the screen from a native app? It's the same text box!

Witty, a C++ webtoolkit (webtoolkit.eu) is mirrored after Qt and is for the web. You don't write HTML or JS, you write C++. Clearly the C++ toolkits are onto something. If they were to merge and have a common API (they practically do now) in an environment with modern conveniences (lambas (yes, C++11) managed memory) we'd have one killer kit. Based on 30 year old technology. And it would be a step in the right direction.