
The End of Coding - alexnorth
http://alexn.id.au/2013/10/30/the-end-of-coding/
======
jtheory
I feel like I've been reading this article every year, with some variation but
the same yet-unrealized potential every time.

I'm not an expert in "human" coding or AI, but I get the same vibe from both
of them -- until you try it yourself, it seems pretty reasonable that
_someone_ will solve this problem fairly soon. And it has seemed that way for
many years now.

Simple CRUD apps can already be built with simple, friendly interfaces. The
simple apps will continue to get easier for non-programmers to assemble
without "coding".

But real life requirements get comlicated soon -- your simple CRUD app now
needs to auto-charge customers every time they foo 100 bars, unless it's been
less than a month (in which case you charge a prorated total at month end),
and early subscribers are grandfathered in to a simple fixed monthly charge.
How will you click-and-drag that? Or explain it _clearly_ in natural language,
without multiple possible interpretations?

People make complicated stuff in Excel spreadsheets, and while it starts off
as fairly vanilla, it quickly becomes something as complicated (if not more
so) than writing a standard computer program in code.

Natural language serves a purpose -- mostly around navigating complicated
social situations, including expressing general desires to others (who have
motivations of their own, and will interpret according to their own internal
rules). It's fuzzy and generally non-specific because that's how we are.

Why do we imagine our normal ways of interacting with each other can be
applied to instructing a process to execute complex & strict logic?

I'm pretty sure we can make progress -- clean up the leakiest abstractions
from software to APIs to hardware... -- and sort out the best way to build
coding languages so they are as intuitive as possible for humans -- but I
don't think "code" generally is going to disappear anytime soon.

~~~
gmjoe
Exactly. I remember, once a friend wanted to create a tool for designers to
use for creating HTML+CSS visually, without having to know actual CSS
properties and such.

Then I explained, the hard part of laying out webpages is not the basic layout
-- it's how layout reflows when text overflows, when the browser window is too
narrow, when image sizes change, what things maintain alignment and what
things don't -- and that by the time you've added all these options to your
visual tool, the visual tool is now equally complicated as CSS, so you've
defeated the whole purpose.

At its heart, it's the fact that the specification of the program _is_ the
program. The devil is always in the details. (Which, incidentally, is why it's
so hard to estimate development time accurately.)

~~~
bluesnowmonkey
It's a good thing you talked your friend down from creating something. The
world has too many creators as it is. Don't they know that everything good has
been created already? If it hasn't been done then it isn't possible!

~~~
resu_nimda
Did you have a point here? Do you think he should have just said "sure man,
sounds great, go for it!" Did you know that a lot of non-programmers have a
lot of great ideas, and that educating them about the difficulties of
implementing those ideas isn't actually a bad thing?

The particular app in question has been tried a million times and countless
hours have been invested into it, perhaps learning from that body of work
would be helpful? But hey, maybe that guy is The One who will come out of
nowhere and solve the problem in a completely new manner (half-serious - it's
technically possible, but I don't think it's useful to put our eggs in that
basket).

~~~
jcoder
> Do you think he should have just said "sure man, sounds great, go for it!"

His friend would have made a lot of personal progress in their understanding
and abilities.

~~~
rwallace
Learning from your own mistakes is effective, but not efficient. Sometimes
it's the best you can do, but when you can learn from other people's mistakes
instead, that's a lot better.

------
jiggy2011
The question that these sorts of articles always raise is ultimately , should
we treat computation as something like mechanical expertise which is important
but can be easily outsourced or is it more like literacy which is critical to
just about every profession and is often used as a proxy for intelligence?

It strikes me that the real difficulty is drawing a line between which tasks
should be left to technical professionals and which should be within reach of
the layman?

This is much easier to define in the case of mechanical devices which tend to
be fairly fixed function rather than computers which are applicable in an
almost infinite number of tasks.

For example , you wouldn't expect a car driver to be able to modify their own
vehicle, but you would expect a lay computer user to be able to do tasks such
as changing their wallpaper or installing software on their computer. I wonder
if this is partly what is driving the popularity of computer hardware with
artificially imposed constraints? Is it simply easier to understand when you
use separate devices for reading books and playing games?

It also begs the question over whether simply changing the means with which to
do something changes the nature of the task. For example is somebody designing
a complex logical system not "programming" because they are doing it inside of
a spreadsheet program instead of an IDE?

~~~
alexnorth
That's a good question. I don't have a personal answer yet, though I do like
your mechanic example.

But to your last point: I chose the word "coding" so as to refer specifically
to the linear textual formal representation we use today. People will keep
designing complex logical systems - indeed, I hope more people will become
more capable of doing so, and I think better tools will help.

------
danso
Call me skeptical. Virtually everyone who has spent more than a few years
programming can attest that it has, at the very least, opened a new dimension
of logical thinking and problem-solving that is not easily found in other
fields. I think the challenge of creating an interface to this kind of
thinking that is friendly to non-coders is difficult enough...but the idea
that once these tools are made, they'll grok what to do? Hmmm...We're much
closer to a future where machine readers can read all manner of text out loud,
but does that mean there's little use for teaching literacy?

edit: Here's an example - I recently got done teaching a data basics class,
and inevitably, my students ran into the problem of data typing in Excel...you
type in something like "9/14" into a field, and it treats it like a date, and
moreover, displays it as "Sep-14". But when you try to concatenate the field,
or perform some other kind of operation on it that is not date-related, Excel
treats it as an integer (number of days since 1904, or something like that).

So Microsoft has arguably done something user-friendly here...virtually anyone
who types in '9/14' _probably_ means September 14, 2013. However, this isn't
always the case, and if it isn't, you have to know how to format columns in
Excel as text. Moreover, the operations upon date types are not at all
intuitive. If you've done a minimal level of programming, you _get_ the idea
of data types, including dates and strings. Let's pretend Microsoft comes up
with a way to perfectly guess what you mean when you've typed in a value...is
it possible this will eliminate the need for the average user to have an
understanding of data types in order to do non-trivial work?

~~~
stelonix
There are many ways to mitigate these issues. The one I like to believe will
be the most used would be a entire new way of using computers. Just like
Google uses complex algorithms in order to try to give you better search
results, I see no reason why Excel can't try to "learn" your usage. I'm quite
saddened that it's 2013 and few applications try to learn more about the
user's usage patterns.

~~~
jiggy2011
I guess the difference is that what google does is already somewhat fuzzy,
when you search for something you're not necessarily even sure what you want
the search engine to return. We also don't expect the results to necessarily
be perfect which is why the search engine returns more than one result.

On the other hand when you're trying to do some specific task you already know
in most cases exactly what you want to happen, so if it does something else
then that is very frustrating.

~~~
stelonix
Well, that's the trade off I'm hoping people are willing to make. Just like we
did it for search back when Google was new, for example: we had to learn how
to use Google compared to whichever search engine we were using before. It's
just like trying to learn a new application. I do believe unless the whole
computing system/environment works in this new paradigm, the effort wouldn't
have as much impact as I'm picturing in my mind.

~~~
jiggy2011
Google is good for searching immensely vast troves of information simply
because there is no other way you could really do it. A categorical index of
the entire internet would be fairly un-feasible.

OTOH when we have smaller and more focused collections of information such as
programming documentation or catalogues of similar products we tend to find it
easier to navigate with categorical listings or simpler search algorithms.

------
xntrk
Every time I see a article like this I think back to my frist programming
class in high school. The teacher asked us a simple homework question.
Describe all of the steps it takes to make a sandwich.

This seems like a simple task. Get all the ingredients and put them together.
This is simple to explain to human because they can make choices on their own
and generally understand how a food is constructed. But when are are trying to
teach a robot how to make a sandwich you have to exaplain every little detail
because it doesn't understand that bread comes in a plastic bag or how to open
it, or where the fridge is, or not make the sandwich on the floor.

Everyone in the class got the question wrong because they were all missing
details.

I believe that code is going to be around for a very long time because it is
currently the only way to truely express 'exactly' what you mean.

------
coldcode
As the author of Trapeze (spreadsheet like application from way back then) is
was nice to be mentioned. People have been trying to make coding go away even
before I started coding and so far it's still moving more in the opposite
direction.

------
Zigurd
I was about to respond to his claims by pointing out that spreadsheets are a
gateway drug for coding and that everyone who tries to do things without
coding ends up coding.

Code is remarkably universal. The article claims spreadsheets are an example
of a post-coding tool, but they, and his other examples, really aren't.
Notably, "visual programming" has been a failure. I expect the end of coding
to be presaged by things that break the linear symbolic language model. There
are no such successful things.

~~~
gruseom
I agree that spreadsheets count as programming, since formulas are code. But
spreadsheets also add a memory model (cell references) and a UI (rows and
columns), and these three things are all smushed together, or rather overlap
perfectly, while in general-purpose programming they are independent and there
is no such overlap. That's perhaps what makes spreadsheets simpler and more
accessible.

~~~
Zigurd
Spreadsheets are accessible programming to people motivated enough to
understand what happens when you have more than a simple column sum in a
spreadsheet, which could be called "programming in constraints." and then that
beautiful code-less, flow-less, condition-less paradise lasts only until you
need a macro.

------
arethuza
I can remember seeing adverts for "The Last One" in the early 1980s while I
was still at school - this was a menu based BASIC application builder:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_%28software%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_%28software%29)

~~~
walshemj
Interesting before I saw you post I made a similar comment I saw this around
the time I started work!!

------
jackmaney
Ah yes, the end of coding is inevitable, the PC is dead, and 2013 will surely
become the year of the Linux desktop.

~~~
marcosdumay
> 2013 will surely become the year of the Linux desktop

There's still a non-zero chance that this one come true. It does not fit well
within the others.

~~~
rejschaap
> There's still a non-zero chance that this one come true.

Best joke of the year.

------
consultant23522
I feel like what companies mean when they say that children should learn to
program is that they should learn problem solving and critical thinking
skills. In my experience these things are saved for only the children who are
tested and marked as "gifted" but average joe should also benefit greatly from
a healthy dose of learning these skills.

------
thibauts
We don't program the computer as much as we program ourselves.

We may be able to build tools that reduce the burden but making a computer
debug itself without either re-stating the expected outcomes and/or
understanding the "intent" of the running code seems pretty much out of reach
by definition.

------
wslh
In the short term it's more about automation/reduction of work than end of
coding. For example, in the past I paid designers hundreds or few thousands
for creating a new version of my web page, now I use Twitter Bootstrap or a
theme and pay a few hundreds for customization.

Now, million of software developers are working on the same problems at the
same time, they are asking the same question and following the same Q&A path
in sites like SO. There is a lot of space for automation.

Regarding new tools for ending coding, nobody came up with a solution yet and
there are a lot of smart people who are/were thinking about it. Surely it will
be a breakthrough but it will work for solving domain specific problems. It's
impossible to solve it for the "general coding problem".

------
tfb
I've been working on [http://loggur.com](http://loggur.com) for a (very) long
time now to address exactly what the author describes. (Note: The home page is
very outdated and vague; I'm planning on redoing it upon release; see my other
comments about the details here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5811801](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5811801))

And I should point out that coding will never fully become unnecessary. Of
course many of the repetitive parts of coding can be automated, but with all
kinds of new ideas and unknown technologies that the future has in store for
us, custom code will almost certainly always be required.

~~~
riskable
Your site looks pretty good to me (and I just viewed it on my phone). Unless
by "outdated" you mean, "it doesn't contain the most up-to-date information
about our product(s)." In that case, well, I look forward to seeing it!
Already added to my Google Calendar.

BTW: I know you're probably trying to collect emails of interested parties
with your "get notified" form but you may wish to consider a direct "Add to
Google Calendar" link or button. Here's an example of how to create such a
link:

[http://www.google.com/calendar/event?action=TEMPLATE&text=Lo...](http://www.google.com/calendar/event?action=TEMPLATE&text=Loggur%20Launch&dates=20131109/undefined&details=Loggur.com%20launch%20date&location=loggur.com&trp=false&sprop=loggur.com&sprop=name:http%3A%2F%2Floggur.com)

If HN supported proper linking it wouldn't look so ugly :)

~~~
tfb
Thanks! 8)

By "outdated", I was referring to the product description(s).

Nice idea for the Google Calendar! Is that a fairly common thing? I can't
recall seeing it anywhere else, but it could just be the bubble I'm in.

------
gshubert17
Alex North writes: "For a long time, GUI builders were crap. GUI builders are
still crap: they often provide a poor representation of what the rendered
interface will look like, are not powerful enough for developers to achieve
exactly what they want, and are too complicated and laden with programming
concepts for non-programmers to use them."

Beginning about 1995, Borland's Delphi (now CodeGear / Embarcadero) seemed to
me to have a pretty nice IDE for making GUIs on Microsoft Windows.

Any opinions on Delphi or information on anything similar for Linux or Mac?

~~~
narag
Try Lazarus:
[http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/](http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/)

About "GUI builders were crap. GUI builders are still crap": that's just BS.
Not usable by non-programmers? Of course. But that hand-wavy dismissal is
terribly lazy. Identifying what's exactly wrong and specially how to improve
is the difficult part.

------
delinka
Every time I see a UI-to-code translator or converter[1], I find that it
produces terribly crufty output- they tend to take that high-level design and
regurgitate The Code that would produce "correct" results. Maybe the answer is
applying compiler-type optimizations to the output.

On the other hand, maybe the answer is learning logic ... nay, code.

[1] The one currently on my mind is the web publisher part of Microsoft Access
from about 2000. Certainly not today's state-of-the-art, but representative of
the typical tool.

------
dasil003
The tools will only improve, but the use of the tools will continue to be
restricted to those who are currently coders until we solve AI. The end of
coding can only be accomplished by true AI as most humans are not capable of
expressing requirements precisely enough for a software program to be
generated without a bunch of follow up questions. The primary value of a good
software developer is to identify and ask these questions as soon as possible.
Writing the code is relatively easy.

------
KiwiCoder
Coding's demise is both inevitable (for certain types of coding) and
improbable (for other types). The debate hinges on how you define coding.

I wrote about this when Visual Studio LightSwitch promised "CODING OPTIONAL"
(verbatim, from the installation splash screen):

[http://cvmountain.com/2011/10/programming-without-
coding/](http://cvmountain.com/2011/10/programming-without-coding/)

An excerpt from my 2011 post -

The dream endures, but why?

One reason could be a lack of trust.

Successful software needs constant maintenance. As a software product becomes
harder and more costly to maintain (as most do) the boss who doesn't quite
trust his team will be tempted to look for alternatives that appear more
trustworthy.

This basic lack of trust becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as communication
breaks down and the team and the boss begin to work in opposition. The boss is
now a prime target for being sold the idea that software development can be
very nearly automated. It’s not a logical process, it’s an emotional one.

In other cases the boss simply lacks the necessary understanding. They might
think that programming is actually an unskilled or semi-skilled profession,
where the programmer simply memorises a quirky list of words and symbols and
then types them in according to a specification written by someone in
marketing.

All this raises the question of what it means to program a computer.

------
mattdmrs
> If you’re a programmer and this offends you, consider how much more value
> you could create if you didn’t spend half your time as a glorified PSD->HTML
> translator.

As the author states, the idea of abstracting away the complexity of creating
user interfaces isn't new, but I think it's wrong to think we could one day
create tools that lets you do that _without_ having to write code and _still_
keep all the flexibility of going sufficiently low-level. An application
platform usually gives you low-level building blocks (e.g. Core Animation) and
higher-level ones (e.g. UIControl and family). You can construct visual tools
to manipulate the latter, but you can't do the same with the former, since
they're much more than just position and parameters. Reducing this difference
in complexity by blaming it on the tools is misguided IMHO.

There an inherent complexity in coding that isn't its weakness but rather it's
advantage. You can't abstract away coding just like you can't abstract away
human language or writing. Could you substitute an essay with a very detailed
painting?

~~~
riskable
I was just about to write something like this. Just because you've got a
pretty GUI that grandma could use to assemble a sophisticated "app" doesn't
mean you have to take away the low-level functionality.

What's wrong with "right-click -> open component in editor"?

I'd also like to add that a lot of people think "coding" means "typing" and
their idea of the ultimate abstraction involves a lot of drag & drop. That
would be just fine for _starting_ the development of an app but would get
really annoying really fast as you start to add more features and
functionality.

At the very least give us the option to perform every single task with the
keyboard in an efficient manner.

------
gte910h
Programming is the new literacy. It isn't going away, it's 5 years out from
being a mandatory high school or middle school topic.

~~~
Dirlewanger
5 years? Mandatory?? You're being insanely optimistic.

~~~
bkurtz13
I would consider that pessimistic. If that becomes true, the tremendous job
security I have now would start to evaporate.

------
Demiurge
I don't think this is going to happen, even if someone invents direct mind-
computer interface. Our thoughts are not precise enough. Everyone who has
transcribed a mathematical equation realizes that context free grammar is just
the most efficient way to express exactly what we want.

------
lispylol
I agree. I think we will continue to abstract our communication with machines
until the act of having to type code into a computer is a task that is largely
only performed by a small subset of society (programmers).

But even when the day of having to do very minimal physical coding to direct
computers arrives, I think there are still many benefits for the majority of
people to learning this crude and dated form of coding. Perhaps not
necessarily to become programmers, but to at least have some understanding of
the guts of machines that power society.

In fact, I think the further removed we get from the physical code in
directing machines, the stronger the imperative we have to expect future
generations to understand not just what something is, but how and why it
works.

~~~
jdiez17
I wholeheartedly agree. I was talking to my professors the other day about
this; I think writing code will have be similar to capturing photographs:
before, only professionals could take a picture: they had to operate this
complicated machine, and then they had to develop the film in a dark room by
impregnating them with chemicals.

Nowadays, most of the population has an immensely capable camera in their
pocket. I foresee that something similar will happen with programming. Most
people will be able to command their computer and teach them to do new things,
without having to know the first thing about how they actually work.

There will still be people that fiddle with data structures and pathfinding
algorithms, but they will be doing it for research purposes or because they
need a highly specialised application.

~~~
lispylol
Yeah, I think photography is a good analogy for capturing (no pun intended)
this trend. And maybe I'm just being overly sentimental, but I feel like
because it's so easy to do things with our devices now without knowing how
they work, that they're often under-appreciated.

For example, there's this popular interview that Louis C.K did on Conan, where
he said "Everything's awesome, and nobody's happy". Sure, most of that
frustration can be attributed to the human condition, but ignorance also plays
a big role. If people knew (and I don't) how planes actually worked (at at
basic level, of course), it's harder to get frustrated about spotty Wifi.

------
ilaksh
I know that everyone will disagree, but for the most part, programmers
shouldn't be writing code either. There are a lot of good tools out there. The
problem is that programming by definition is writing code. And tools that
don't involve code are for non-programmers.

The problem is the definition of programming. And the fact that people are
afraid they won't be considered a 'real' programmer if they don't write
cryptic code.

I believe that right around the time that programmers start to figure that
out, general AIs will come out about 1.5 times as smart as the smartest human,
and at that point ordinary human's childish perspectives and problems won't be
very relevant.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
This is so ethereal. What do you really mean by this? What is it that
programmers have to figure out? That they have been bad boys and girls using
cryptic code? ...

Ok go make video editing package without any of ths "coding" nonsense and then
explain it to us childish programmers. :)

No but seriously I don't think there is a lot here ...

------
Mikeb85
Coding is simply telling a computer what to do. Even to a certain degree,
entering a term into Google's search engine is a type of coding. And maybe
that will be the future, parsers and compilers that can turn plain language
into computer instructions. We're not terribly far off with
transpilers/compilers that turn Python and other high level languages into C
or native code...

Until a computer can program itself (which may never happen), there's going to
be a person telling it what to do - and no matter whether it's a formula in a
spreadsheet, a programming language, or something higher level, it'll still be
code...

------
noir_lord
I'm still waiting for the hard AI we where promised was 10 years away 40 years
ago.

These posts beside some hand waving never actually attack the meat of the
issue, don't predict the demise of something unless you know what is going to
kill it.

------
williamcotton
Spreadsheets work better than code in some instances. Visual data-flow (boxes
and noodles) in some instances. Graphing calculators in others. Hell, even
Morphic and VB have their place!

Each of these tools creates a 'function' in some way or another. The main
problem I see is that it is too hard to make a function in a spreadsheet,
combine it with a function made in a data-flow graph editor, and all tied
together with a function made in a text coding language.

We need to make the publishing and consumption of 'functions' easier. I've
started the work on the underlying framework. Please stay tuned!

------
websitescenes
There are already tools like you describe and many people use them. The issue
is that these tools create vanilla, cookie cutter solutions that rarely fit
the situation precisely. If you want a truly original or custom work flow that
will fit the situation precisely, then your going to have to code to some
extent. Here is an example: artiste er is a program that bypasses the need for
handwriting markup. Sure you made a template but it looks like every other
shitty Aristeer site. Coding will always be an advantage for those that are
willing. The rest can be ok mediocrity.

------
bhewes
Please, this is like saying no new works of Poetry, Philosophy, Fiction,
Drama, Religion will be written. Reminds me of Fukuyama's ridiculous "End of
History" argument.

------
normloman
Regular people have a hard enough time doing every day tasks on the computer
with GUIs. If we can't make regular work easy, how the hell do you expect to
make programming easy?

~~~
dinkumthinkum
Regular people have a hard enough time doing every day tasks. Full stop.

------
jcutrell
To accomplish the complexity of issues I face on a daily basis in code, I
would hate to build in a GUI.

I can type faster than I can search for the right button in Photoshop. Ask
anyone who lives in their terminal - it will increase (rather than decrease)
your productivity and agility. This isn't because the gui isn't well made.

I think a better prediction is, writing code and building constructs will be
easier. Cognitive overhead will be reduced. That's the design problem - not
coding.

------
lnanek2
So far visual coding has just been useful for minting more CS degrees, not
actually getting stuff done. Can't really see things going this guy's
direction.

------
dinkumthinkum
This is hand waving month or something. Oh this just so cute but honestly when
you are ready to be serious and deal with complex things and not GUI for
"Grandma" then you will see this is little more than a vague performance of
day dreaming. The only way for the to come to fruition some sort of strong AI,
even then ... Show some non trivial examples, not this HTML GUI stuff.

------
svachalek
For decades we've done coding the only way we can given the hardware
available. But nowadays program sizes are approaching the amount of
information stored in human DNA, which is a blueprint for a self-fueled, self-
healing, self-reproducing nanotech computing machine that puts any modern
software to shame. I'm beginning to think we're doing it wrong.

------
protomyth
We still have a lot of work to do in tooling to make things simpler. Take for
example Xcode. Xcode is harder to use than the old Interface Builder / Project
Manager combo. We continue to add complexity that works for experts, but is a
pain to onboard people. It is amazing how many people got HyperCard, but would
not be able to touch Xcode.

------
lcedp
Why nobody wonders that it is still required to know math to develop
engineering construction. Or that it is required to know chemistry to create
dish washing products.

Why then so many people find it strange that to write a program you must..
program.

------
georgemcbay
Eventually we will be obsoleted by the machines, but this will not happen soon
and we'll be the second last to go (entertainers will be the last).

~~~
svantana
But before that, we will have some pretty amazing tools that will make us feel
like magicians (regrettably for all too short a time though)

------
Murk
I said a similar sort of thing to someone just last week. He thought I was
nuts. Time will tell.

The end of the world is nigh. etc.

------
6d0debc071
Can I see certain aspects of coding becoming automated? Certainly. And I can
think of some visual ways of presenting code that are very attractive in the
extra information they give to the programmer.

But something like, 'give me the set of all things that....'

(let ((set1 (remove-if #'(lambda (x) (not (things that....))) from-lst)))
'BODY)

How'd you do that in Excel? Probably something _like_ SUMIF - (I don't really
use Excel much so I don't know if there's something that returns a list of
things matching a predicate.)

Yes, doubtless that can be expressed more concisely than the code. Heck you
could wrap that up and just call it fetchset and have it go.

(set1 (fetchset (things-that) from-lst))

But there you're putting more load on the person learning the arcana of
certain macros or functions - and it's honestly not that much more concise in
terms of headspace, you still have to think about sets for it to make any
sense at all. It's not clear how that would translate into a visual interface
of any significant power or how doing so would simplify the concepts that one
would have to learn.

You know? Will programming get more efficient? Count on it. Will we automate
tasks that are just following a pattern? Yeah. But will we stop coding?

Well, if you think about coding as being typing, then maybe we will. I don't
think that visual interfaces are efficient enough to let you stick together
all the concepts you need in a reasonable space of time without actually
typing - but it's possible.

But will we stop thinking computationally? (Which is the real essence of
coding I feel.) I don't think so. It seems to me that you have to know what
you want a computer to do, or you have to have the computer guess at it. And
the problem with guessing at it, other than the computer being wrong, is that
if you're not a precise thinker; if don't know fairly precisely what you want
to do; then you can't even mean certain things. Assuming quicksort hasn't been
invented yet, how do you tell the computer that you want quicksort if it's
guessing, what cues does the computer take from a general expression that you
want a faster kind of sort?

Now whether that will reduce coding to mathematics I don't know. I'd tend to
think not, if for no better reason than that programming includes a kind of
coevolutionary mastery that can be a more fitting route for some people into
thinking about things like transformations and sets and so on. I'm deeply
indebted to programming for helping me think about maths in a way other than
my teacher just reading black-box formula at the class.

------
walshemj
yeah right I can recall a hyped product called "the last one" which was
supposed to do this and that was for the PET and Apple II Era in the 70's

------
fka
ironic. :)

------
static_typed
As the site now says "Error establishing a database connection " maybe the
coding was ended a little too early?

~~~
pragmar
Cached -
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qjCebmD...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qjCebmDnUkcJ:alexn.id.au/2013/10/30/the-
end-of-coding/+&cd=2&hl=en)

