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tl;dr Do you think we will any time soon move from editing raw source code? Will IDE or other interfaces allow us to change the code in graphic representation or even through voice?
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One thing I found funny watching Westworld is how they depicted the "programming" - it is more like swiping on a smartphone, a bit maybe like Tom Cruise's investigations in Minority report. Or giving certain commands and key words by voice.

There was one quote from Uncle Bob's "Clean Code" I could never find again, where he said something along the lines, that back in the seventies or eighties they thought they would soon raise programming languages to such a high level they would use natural language interfaces, and look at us now, still the same "if's".

So I feel uncomfortable without my shell and having tried a graphical programming language once this particular (Labview) seemed clumsy to me at best. But maybe there are a lot of web devs here and it seems with them frameworks you might be able to abstract away a lot of the pesky system programming... so do you feel like moving to some new shiny programming experience or do you think it will stay the same for more decades as the computer is that stupid machine where you have to spill it out instruction by instruction anyways?

Comments
  • 4
    Great post. I think it will happen for certain use cases. Also, friends knowing my love for tech told me I have to watch Westworld - the TV show. Is the tech cool in it?
    Uncle Bob might make a great devRant podcast guest.
  • 1
    I have to agree with Jumpshoot44, I think those advances are mostly going to be domain specific. Look at videogame programming with unity and unreal and the tooling you have where you move and preview objects visually, have a graphical animation tree, etc.. Also we have some advances with programming environments that let you tweak variables while testing and iterating really fast (nothing robust yet, AFAIK)..

    But besides tooling, until we have some awesome AI I don't think traditional programming languages are going anywhere.
  • 0
    I was going to say there's already grounds for it. We have Labview, there's Scratch, komenskio (I vaguely remember that bring a thing, so might be dead???)
  • 2
    ++ for mentioning Westworld, my new favorite series (:
  • 1
    If I were you, I wouldn't even try to write something serious in LabView. I am forced to use it for my intro Robotics class, and, coming from Common Lisp and Clojure, it makes me want to tear my hair out every single time I need to write something. Especially if it has something to deal with concurrency.
  • 0
    I think compilers will eventually have some form of AI to help branching, decisions, etc based on comments and your personal coding style. For example, you would not want to run any sort of ML algorithm over my comments.. it would never compile. Others are maybe less sarcastic in their comments? Just a thought.. nice post!
  • 0
    @leuu Game development (maybe also CGI) is a good point (another area I am barely familiar with other than finishing a tiny blender tutorial). Maybe when VR finally takes off they will eat the other parts of software development.. just like software is eating the world?
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