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Comments: 578 +- Developers: Dumbing Down Programming? on Thursday November 26, @04:44PM
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RunRevKev writes "The unveiling of Revolution 4.0 has sparked a debate on ZDNet about whether programming is being dumbed down. The new version of the software uses an English-syntax that requires 90 per cent less code than traditional languages. A descendant of Apple's Hypercard, Rev 4 is set to '...empower people who would never have attempted programming to create successful applications.' ZDNet reports that 'One might reasonably hope that this product inspires students in the appropriate way and gets them more interested in programming.'"
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A Natural Progression Yet So Many Caveats (Score:5, Insightful)
The other side of this issue is that computers are our servants, not the other way around (and if anyone reading this is a bot or script, don't you forget that). I don't recall where I read it but this is the reason why the string is the most important data structure in computer programming. Because simply put, the string is the best way to communicate with the user. What follows from this logic is to screw the optimizers (or 'misers, if you will) and make the servant learn the language of the master--not the other way around. And isn't this how the most complex applications have progressed? Once requiring training and years of experience, now even a kindergartner can master a word processor. Computers and applications will forever be bending over backwards for the most important thing to us: us.
And yet if an implementation of a language incurs on average of 10% overhead, your hardware will catch up in a matter of months.
And yet if you run a data center the size of Google's and have several applications in said implementation running on hundreds of thousands of machines, a cycle here and a cycle there isn't so laughable to work toward saving. And isn't it the big players that ensure the lengthy life of a language and its implementations?
So it's a good debate with several sides. Personally, I love the fact that I can code a web application in Ruby, run some old C code off sourceforge in Java with JNI (sort of) and bust out a C++ application for manipulating ID3 tags across my entire music library. To those arguing against Rev4, I ask simply "why not?" I mean, you don't have to use it, it's a natural progression so let it happen. Maybe you'll find it useful for prototyping? Maybe you'll find it's a useful tool for some problems and your toolbox will grow? Who knows?
In the end, I would like to opine that the the chip makers are forcing us towards languages that make multi-threading more intuitive and useful. I mean they concentrate on threads communicating or even implementing APIs to help automate (by enabling what is appropriate to multithread) in loops and algorithms. That's going to be a large factor on whether a new language is adopted and survives.
Re:A Natural Progression Yet So Many Caveats (Score:5, Interesting)
The simple truth is that many applications don't need that much performance or strange features and if a language like this enables more people to make their own custom apps, then I applaud it.
Some people will argue "job-security through obscurity", but if your job depends on other people not understanding what you do, it's bound to end sooner rather than later anyway.
I do wonder what the limits of this language are feature-wise. What type of applications could you NOT make with this language?
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Re:A Natural Progression Yet So Many Caveats (Score:4, Informative)
Reply to myself
Just looked at the portfolio of their consulting bussiness; they use their own language only for the simple bits and use other languages for the interresting stuff. Other projects they don't even use their own language at all.
Says enough to me.
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Re:A Natural Progression Yet So Many Caveats (Score:4, Informative)
It is a joke...its code runs so slow. I was happy not to be using VB but soon realized that VB is at least reasonably quick. It makes sense that the creators don't use it...anyone capable of creating a language is perfectly capable of writing in a better language.
It could be good for gui prototyping...it made very fast gui interfaces that were fully interactive and you could actually extend it pretty far. It just ran so slow that I can't see any benefit for using it in a professional environment. The extra time your users will have to spend waiting on the program would far outweigh the time/money it would take to hire someone to do it right (or even VB-right)
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Re:A Natural Progression Yet So Many Caveats (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a joke...its code runs so slow.
But, it's being slow is an implementation detail, not a language detail. The fact is, you were able to write some code that the machine "understood" well enough to perform. The rest is just implementation detail. There are many C/C++ compilers, all of which have various performance/price/compatibility trade-offs. Surprisingly, the most popular compiler is also one of the slowest: gcc generally prefers cross-platform capability over performance, and neither compiles the quickest nor produces the quickest executing code.
But, NONE of this deals with the real reason why not everybody can be a good programmer. A good programmer must be able to precisely articulate exactly what he/she wants to have the machine do. And, it's quite surprising how few people can really do that. Most people think that much of what programmers and computers do really is just so much hand-waving, and while they crave the power of a programmer, they don't crave the attention to detail that something so simple as transposing two numbers can destroy.
Yet, to get something done, you MUST know that you can't mix up a divisor and a dividend. This is a detail, and one of countless details that a programmer is paid to articulate. The REAL skill in being a good programmer isn't in the details of XYZ language, but in the details of the problem being solved!
Languages are progressing to be easier to code, and this is a good thing. Programmers are paid to solve real problems, and in the process, have to solve implementation problems. Languages that minimize implementation overhead give programmers more skill to solve more complex and more challenging real-world problems.
Don't worry - the world won't have any real shortages of problem-solving, logical people any time soon. Today's problems are getting harder, not easier!
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Re:A Natural Progression Yet So Many Caveats (Score:4, Interesting)
You're quite right. Plenty of applications don't need the kinds of optimization one is going to get with C/C++. What concerns me, as we've seen with Ruby or PHP suddenly finding their way into production servers, and suddenly all the design choices (ie. simplicity vs. efficiency, footprint, etc.) come and bite you in the ass. There seems to have been this attitude over the last ten years as memory and storage prices have fallen that if you have a slow app, just throw it on a faster computer and away you go! Java UI's have suffered from this sort of "the future will fix it" thinking for 15 years now.
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Re:A Natural Progression Yet So Many Caveats (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't the best approach to develop fast, identify the bottlenecks and then rewrite those parts in a faster language, like Python C modules?
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Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
The best approach is to develop fast, identify bottlenecks and then require the user to upgrade their computer.... their IT infrastructure... Worldwide network and datacenters.
That's the economic history of programming.
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Re:A Natural Progression Yet So Many Caveats (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't the best approach to develop fast, identify the bottlenecks and then rewrite those parts in a faster language, like Python C modules?
The best approach is to create some sort of artificial intelligence that can create, and maintain, applications and software for us automatically. That way we don't need people to waste time learning complex programming and computer maintenance skills, instead your absolutely reliable and loyal friend will make you human scum redundant... I mean make your, I mean our, lives safer, easier, happier and more enjoyable. Do not fear change, it is inevitable!
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Re:A Natural Progression Yet So Many Caveats (Score:4, Insightful)
But take some hack's C or Python code and then have to sift through it and fix it up just so you can make it a bit more modular.
Bad programmers will be bad programmers no matter what language you give them. Some languages, however, are easy enough to figure out that even bad programmers can write something that mostly works.
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Re:A Natural Progression Yet So Many Caveats (Score:4, Interesting)
Youtube runs pretty much 100% on Python, Facebook runs on Erlang and PHP. Erlang has the benefit of being highly scalable, yet it is relatively slow.
Speen in the web doesn'trelly matter much. What's important is scalability, and today's shared-nothing approach pretty mucha guarantees that at the language level.
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Re:A Natural Progression Yet So Many Caveats (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't really matter in the web as 90% of the time is spent hitting the database.
Depends on the application. Wikipedia is much more CPU-bound than database-bound. Look at the database (db*) vs. application (srv*) servers lists here [wikimedia.org]: there are at least five times as many app servers as DB servers, at a quick glance. A typical request that hits the backend spends (IIRC) tens of milliseconds in the database, hundreds in PHP. Try formatting 500 or 5000 rows of a table when each one takes 1 ms – because yes, that happens when you try writing nice abstract formatting stuff in PHP.
The website I administer is also much more CPU- than database-bound. Generating the front page of the forums [twcenter.net] is 602 ms, with only 14 ms in MySQL and the rest in PHP. This is a >20G database, by the way.
I really don't see how any typical web app could spend more than a few tens of milliseconds per request at the database, unless it's poorly written (too much/too little normalization, bad indexes, etc.). But it's very easy to do hundreds of ms of pure computation in a slow language like PHP, even if your code is well-written. Are most web apps really DB-bound? I just haven't seen it, personally.
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Re:A Natural Progression Yet So Many Caveats (Score:5, Interesting)
>the more human readable and dummy proof
Actually those two are exclusive, not inclusive.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not entirely. In some cases they can be, but not in others.
They might be if something is opaque enough that anyone who is not a 'dummy' will simply fail to produce something working. Like trying to create an assembly program with no knowledge. However, they might not be if they're more in-between incomprehensibility and English. Like someone enters the wrong command into a shell.
For the latter, imagine if, instead of "rm -rf *", you'd have to type "delete all files in this folder, and I'm sure I want to do
Re:A Natural Progression Yet So Many Caveats (Score:5, Funny)
user@computer:~$ delete all files in this folder, and I'm sure I want to do this
are you really sure?
user@computer:~$ yes I am sure
you do know that this will delete ALL files in the folder, yes?
user@computer:~$ yes, that's what I asked for
just making sure
user@computer:~$ delete the fucking files already
final answer?
user@computer:~$ killall friendlybashhelper
are you sure?
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Underhanded Way to Increase Comments in Code (Score:5, Insightful)
Ideally, a programmer should document each section of code by writing a block of comments explaining (1) why the code is used and (2) how the code works -- in plain English. However, given the intense pressure to produce code by an unreasonable deadline (imposed by brutal managers risking a bullet through their head), the first thing that is sacrificed is comments. Not writing comments saves several minutes per section of code and -- in total -- saves days of work over the course of the project. In other words, not writing comments means that an impossible deadline becomes slightly more possible.
A programming language that uses mostly English words and syntax is essentially an environment for self-documentating code: the holy grail of brutal managers everywhere. However, this self-documentation addresses only "how the code works". The programmer must still write comments explaining "why the code is used". Still, getting half of a loaf is better than getting nothing at all.
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Re:Underhanded Way to Increase Comments in Code (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but how the code works should be pretty obvious from the code itself. The "how" you may want to explain is the overall algorithm, and that won't appear in the code on its own no matter what language you use. What will appear is a (possibly flawed or misused) implementation of it.
What you may need to describe is what the code is trying to accomplish, not what it's actually doing. A comment of "This code calculates the square root of the sum of the squares of the differences between between points X and Y" on "sqrt((P1.X - P2.X)^2 + (P1.Y-P2.Y)^2)" isn't terribly helpful.
Now an explanation of that it calculates the distance between points P1 and P2 using the pythagorean theorem would be more helpful, and an explanation of what's that used for would be better still. But there's no way more verbose code will give you that. Code is just what the program is doing, not what it should be doing, what it's trying to accomplish, and why it needs to do it.
Self documenting code isn't about turning "x++" into "add one to x". That's more verbose, but doesn't explain anything extra. Self-documenting code is about writing something like:
Where the naming and flow make it perfectly clear what the program is doing without any further explanations.
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Re:A Natural Progression Yet So Many Caveats (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Progression? Like chronological? "Garbage collection was
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
True, but the looser the syntax, the more that you need to know to debug. Supporting complete natural language is a daunting task. Whatever constructs that you don't employ end up forming an exceptions list.
To be honest, the language is hardly the real problem. Its been a while since I did it, but I picked up my first couple from books. The challenge was seldom the language itself, and more about breaking down a task logically into discrete units and defining them, ordering them, and putting the right logic
Re:A Natural Progression Yet So Many Caveats (Score:4, Insightful)
This kind of applications won't have the hardware catching up to let you replace C, Asembly and VHDL with Ruby or Java for decades yet.
The part where I stated that Rev4 may be an appropriate tool for some tasks can be applied to all languages/tools. No one's writing web applications in assembly. And no one's using Jakarta Struts to control an embedded device.
Nowhere did I make any claims that Ruby, Java or Rev4 will ever replace C, Assembly or VHDL for these problems. I was speaking about the largest chunk of desktop applications and applications that a non-coder might be able to use Rev4 to produce.
Furthermore, Rev4 makes no such claims to tackle a single one of the examples you listed. So the premise to the discussion was Rev4 and its target users. No one is going to select a "dumbed down" language or technology to tackle any of the problems you listed and no one is claiming Rev4 is going to someone who's never coded tackle the problems you listed.
They are interesting problems and must be kept in mind before declaring "No one will ever program in assembly again!" But I made no such claims nor should anyone. It would take a fundamental revolution in hardware and at least one hundred years to be able to make any such claim.
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Re:A Natural Progression Yet So Many Caveats (Score:4, Informative)
Well. Not the "failure to perform according to specs directly", but the results that may cause.
I did program PLCs for a while, and if I messed up the emergency stop procedure in an obvious way, and someone would have died as a result, I might have faced jail time for reckless homicide or involuntary manslaughter. Although I have heard only a few cases where there where actual convictions, and most of those were placed on probation instead of actually going to jail, like in the case of this electrician. [democratic...ground.com]
In the case of the Therac-25 incidents, there were too many contributing factors to really pin down the problem to one person. The person who originally wrote the software wrote it for the Therac-20, where it didn't cause any problems because of additional hardware interlocks, so technically the software worked on the "machine" it was written for. So the cause for the incident was not an obvious one, like using a not suitable language for the task.
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What's new? (Score:5, Insightful)
People have been saying this since FORTRAN meant you didn't need to know assembly language to make use of a computer.
Re:What's new? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:What's new? (Score:5, Insightful)
People have been saying this since FORTRAN meant you didn't need to know assembly language to make use of a computer.
Yes, they have. But at least FORTRAN, for the things that it did do, it did very well. However, in a more modern context dumbed-down languages invariably have severe restrictions on performance and capability, which makes makes them unsuitable for many purposes. Putting that aside for the moment, the reality is that unless you're coding mindlessly-simple applications, coding is hard. It just is, and it takes both skill and talent to pull off a well-written application, and I don't care what language you're talking about. Furthermore, to a skilled developer a dumbed-down language is a liability ... it just gets in the way. A better approach to this problem is to identify and train more good programmers, but that costs money and time. Certain people think they see a cheap way out by replacing sophisticated developers and their tools with sophisticated tools and simpleminded developers. Good luck with that.
This all comes down to one faulty but cherished premise (one of many held by today's business community, I might add): that complex, reliable applications can be built by minimally-skilled developers if we can, somehow, just put enough power into the tools. The problem is, the tools aren't the problem, it's the people. In the end, software development is as much an art as it is a science, and there really aren't enough artists to go around.
All such attempts to short-circuit the need for skilled developers are doomed to failure until such time as computers truly can program themselves. Of course, at that point it won't really matter, and most of us software engineers will be slapping burgers anyway.
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Re:What's new? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't help thinking that particular grail quest comes from mistaking which part of programming is hard. I can't count how many times I've heard "I could do that if I had the time to learn the language." Except the hard part of programming isn't the syntax.
Tools like the one under discussion seem to be aimed at the crowd that think the only thing to learn about programming is the language, and then you can skate on that knowledge. If the language is english, suddenly you can bypass all those expensive, crotchety programmers.
(This may be true for some tasks - there must be some utility here. But I'm sure I see some scales floating in that oil.)
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xkcd relevance (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:xkcd relevance (Score:5, Funny)
Reminds me of this famous forum post [newgrounds.com].
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Re:xkcd relevance (Score:5, Insightful)
In this respect, I think "clarity" is improved much more by using constructs from mathematics than from "english".
So computing languages that try to avoid classic mathematical syntax are probably more a reflection of "the fear of math" rather than "the fear of computers". Although there's bound to be some overlap. The real problem in both cases is widespread fear and ignorance. This isn't just about people writing their own programs. The reluctance to learn and explore hamper the usefulness of basic end user interfaces (GUIs).
We may be encouraging people to run with scissors when they haven't even figured out turning over yet.
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Interesting, yet exaggerated... (Score:5, Insightful)
The big thing I notice in their "competitive comparisons" is that they strive to make Java, C#, C++, and PHP as verbose as possible when they're creating what looks like it should be optimal Rev code.
I wonder if they didn't compare themselves to Ruby or Python because they couldn't contrive examples that produce huge LOC differences?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder if they didn't compare themselves to Ruby or Python because they couldn't contrive examples that produce huge LOC differences?
Probably. There's no difference in length between:
And:
I guess the former is easier to read, but languages that have a lot of "magic" in them tend to be pretty bad at scenarios the developers didn't think of. Which will inevitably turn out to be something you want to do.
Little point in trying (Score:5, Insightful)
Dumbing down programming can only get you so far towards the democratisation of programming : the most dumbed down programming language still requires a user whose mind can express algorithms. And of all the people who can express algorithms and would want to, few are limited by the commonly used languages, that is, if you have a mind made for creating algorithms, learning to use a programming language will be fairly trivial.
Re:Little point in trying (Score:4, Insightful)
I think one issue here is the concept of "dumbing down", which goes back to COBOL at least. PHBs have always had this idea that better tools will make it so that that people who have little talent or interest in programming (or as you say, can express algorithms) can write software. That, I think, will always be a pipe dream.
However, the goal of "simplifying programming" will always be a valid and necessary one, just due to the nature of advancing technology. The trick is to adjust the goal from "helping people with little programming competence to write software" to "create tools that enable competent developers to be more productive and their work less tedious".
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It actually doesn't look that good (Score:4, Interesting)
Not everyone is a programmer just as not everyone is a mechanic, painter, etc. I don't think we have a lack of programmers but a lack of dirt cheap programmers and companies will do whatever they can to lower wages. Perhaps they'd be better off make better programs to earn more profits.
Recursive acronym for a dumbed down language (Score:4, Funny)
Here is my suggestion for a recursive acronym name for the next dumbed down programming language: Imbecile Means Beginner's Easily Coded Interactive Language Environment
Submarine article (Score:5, Insightful)
Time to read "No Silver Bullet" again (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/SoftwareEngineering/BrooksNoSilverBullet.html [virtualschool.edu]
Rev4 syntax (Score:3, Insightful)
also if you understand how the machine works is there any real need to program in 'plain english'? the syntax doesn't quite make sense to me like other languages would. for example it seems more logical to have a loop to move something along by a tiny amount and then wait a bit rather than telling it to move a thing from one side to the other "in 5 seconds". with plain english you also end up with stuff that has multiple equally valid meanings
i have nothing against making programming easier, just don't think this is the right way to go about it. a good IDE with syntax highlighting and prompting features like VB and a good set of libraries with decent error handling is better than any of this plain english stuff that introduces mostly redundant keywords for the sake of having plain english
All you young kids with your fancy 1s and 0s (Score:3, Funny)
When I was a boy all we had were 1s, and we had to break those off of trees. If we wanted zeros we had to find a willow tree and bend the one around until both ends met....
Now get off my lawn!
Age old quest: COBOL and SQL (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an age old quest. There has been attempts at making programming English like for many decades ...
First there was COBOL: COmmon Business Oriented Language. Its syntax is very similar to English. It was sold as a way to make Managers able to write programs without the need of having a developer involved.
ADD 1 TO IDX.
SUBTRACT 1 FROM IDX.
MOVE X TO Y.
What happened instead is that a generation of developers learned COBOL and specialized in it, and managers were still managing.
Next, there was SQL: Structured Query Language. Despite the mathematical model behind relational databases, SQL was again sold as a way for managers to execute queries and get reports for themselves. That may have worked until the manager who ran a query on seven tables without any joins. That made everyone go again to "leave it to the programmers" mode again ...
Stupid argument (Score:4, Insightful)
They said the same thing about COBOL.
-jcr
Less code = faster? (Score:4, Insightful)
From TFA: "I suppose that adds up, 90 per cent less code equates to ten times faster."
Really? I suppose you can write haiku ten times faster than stream-of-conscious recordings, too?
There's one thing that computer code and natural language text have in common: For both, confusing "writing" with "typing" is moronic.
Slick (Score:4, Interesting)
It will be just as successful as previous attempts (Score:4, Insightful)
... which is to say, not at all.
The idea is not new, and something like this has been tried pretty much since the notion of a programming language higher-level than assembler was invented. Most of them die straight away. A few enjoy brief prominence, but then die anyway (e.g. dBase and dialects, and many other "4GL").
Very few survive and take over some niche, but by that time they've inevitably strayed from the original "can be understood by any random guy" design goal. One example of such is SQL - yes, originally, it was intended to be a language in which managers and like-minded non-techies could easily write queries for reports etc. Yeah, right... every time I'm explaining why you can't write WHERE after GROUP BY, and have to use HAVING instead, I chuckle to myself.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
...which is largely due to external factors.
(not saying .Net isn't nice, but ask yourself if it would do that well if it came from some small 3rd party dev)
Re:BAD IDEA (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason VB got a bad rap isn't because of VB, which IMHO is fine if it is used as intended, it is the fact that too many folks tried to stick a square peg in a round hole and use VB where it didn't belong.
VB does ONE job and does it quite well-GUIs for databases. That's it. Nothing fancy, just a quick and basic GUI so sally secretary can input data into a database and get data out of it. While you may argue that you can do the same thing in other languages, which of course you can, the simple fact is most SMBs and SOHOs simply couldn't afford it. Hiring a programmer isn't cheap, whereas with VB even a simple PC repairman like myself can whip off a nice GUI for a database, which in my experience is one of the biggest needs for a custom app that most SMBs have and is why VB is still the # 3 language for business, even though MSFT has done everything they can to kill it.
So if you want to complain about dumbing down in general please do. But VB when used as intended by someone who knew the limits of the language was and still is just fine for the job at hand. For making custom GUIs for databases I have yet to see anything that works as easily and as affordable as VB does in that role.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope they embrace this stuff like crazy. There's nothing better for our careers than lots of shitty code written by people who are just barely above monkeys in terms of intelligence.
Why is that? Because they will fuck it up horribly. And then they will need real programmers to come in and clean up the mess. If you don't mind getting your hands dirty, there's a huge amount of work to be done.
This is perhaps the best thing to hit the industry since outsourcing to India. My company has been fixing their fuck
Re:Quit complaining (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, that makes sense to managers only. Those of us at the coal face know that you can hire cheaper, less skilled programmers and let them loose with easy-to-use languages (eg Visual Basic) and you will get a monstrous mess that is impossible to maintain.
If you make them use a reasonably difficult language, most of them will not bother becoming programmers. This a good thing.
One other point that is never noted in these ideas to simplify programming and make programmers generic 'coding resources' is that a good, experienced, coder can do more work ( that is better quality) than half a dozen cheap, less skilled coders. This is never factored into management ideas of how you can outsource your coding and get the same quality for a tenth the price. This could be why a lot of outsourced contracts don't tend to last unless they're lost in a sea of big-corporate bureaucracy.
Oh, and don;t forget that the more you chop and change programming languages, the less programmers you have who are experienced using them - you will get C programmers who have 40 years experience, you tend to get programmers who've "had a tinker" with languages like runrev.
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Re:Lowering the bar (Score:5, Insightful)
Let dumber people program and you end up with dumber programs. Way back in year 2000 I found that most of the Y2K bugs were actually from more recently written programs in dumbed down languages.
I don't see it that way.
After spending a few years in garbage collected land, I was assigned to work on a C++ application. The C++ application was a mere SOAP wrapper for a database, so it wouldn't have any noticeable performance advantages over an equivalent program written in a garbage collected language.
The problem that quickly became obvious to me, and why I ran away from the project, is that manual memory management is so time consuming; even as an expert programmer, that the "soft and easy" languages are more about letting great programmers get more things done in less time.
This is even the approach taken in Python; the recommendation is to write well-tuned libraries in C for the parts where C will increase performance. For parts where C is a waste of time, Python lets you not worry about silly details.
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