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Fixing the Pain of Programming
An anonymous reader writes "Light Table is a Kickstarted, open source IDE that's been trying to integrate real-time feedback into code creation. Part of their process has been figuring out how to improve the practice of programming, from top to bottom. They've put up a post about the troublesome aspects of programming that we've learned to deal with and take for granted, but which need solving if programming is to be made accessible for more people. 'Surprisingly, one of the most common difficulties we have heard from beginners is just running code. Even if we were to hand [a new programmer the whole source code] they would likely still struggle to actually use it. They have to install dependencies, compile code, start servers and open ports. At each step the errors are difficult to diagnose and time-consuming to fix.' But these problems extend to experienced coders, too: 'The simplest question we could ask about our application is "what is the current state." Bizarrely, very few programming environments give you any help on this front. Many programmers get by with nothing but print statements.' It's interesting to see somebody working on these issues, instead of accepting that they're the status quo and just part of the experience of programming."
I suppose this is addressed by the old quote "What is the best language for x?"
"I don't know. Which has the best debugger?"
When you spend 8 hours troubleshooting an open-source project to compile with a third party proprietary library it feels damn good to make it work. Coding is good because it's hard. The higher the stakes the more the accomplishment of that task will make me proud/happy.
Sure... there are some places where things should be simple. When I install an IDE I expect it to compile a hello world just after typing the proper code.
This combination doesn`t exist: ETIs that know about humanity and want to see us dead. Otherwise we wouldn't exist.
Programming has a spectrum of difficulty. The tools can always be improved to make the easier parts easier and the harder parts more manageable, but in the end the hard parts are hard because of the nature of the work; not due to lack of tools.
In more mature fields the spectrum of difficulty is well understood and no one expects the hard parts to be easy. If a person can write a "hello world" program then it should not be expected they will have the wherewithal to roll out healthcare.gov. If a person can apply a bandage to a skinned knee then it should not be expected they will have the wherewithal to do brain surgery; regardless of how good the tools are.
Historically, so far, the easier you make it, the harder the problems become.
One of the most visible examples of this is in frontend web development. Now that we have jquery and a billion javascript librairies, we don't do the same simple web pages we used to in a fraction of the time (something that would have taken a month back then takes literally seconds today). Instead, we do crazy shit that were never meant to be done in a browser.
If we make that crazy shit easier, people will just go and do crazier shit.
Yeah, but this perception of programming is the real problem.
Programming is not a "pain" if you do it right. Most of the times programming is a "pain" because you are working with code or frameworks written by mediocre programmers who probably shouldn't be programmers. The more accessible you try to make programming, the more mediocre programmers will be encouraged to write code and software that will be a pain to work with.
the more accessible you make it the more people get into it and the more of a commodity it will become
even now developing and coding is a commodity in a lot of fields or a secondary skill to being a math whiz and working with algorithms on data sets
So true. I studied computer science at university, never graduated because I began consulting. Years later I am finishing a mathematics degree and regret ever pursuing computer science much less the IT career into which it led me. I came across the textbook for an introductory computer science course at a leading university in Canada; it was so dumbed down I almost cried. The notion everyone should learn to programme computers is ridiculous in the same sense everyone should should learn to wire their own home or repair their own automobile.
Yes, I usually get by with print statements as well, because I do not need anything else! Learning to debug is a critical part of learning how to program. Taking that away is plain harmful. Advanced debuggers give you more, but anybody that cannot debug simpler print-statements does not have the level of understanding of the code that is absolutely required to make it any good.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You are certainly right about eclipse being an elephant.