On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 12:20 PM, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 12:46 AM, Nathan Rice > <nathan.alexander.r...@gmail.com> wrote: >> I believe in the idea of "things should be as simple as possible, but >> not simpler". Programming as it currently exists is absolutely >> convoluted. I am called on to help people learn to program from time >> to time, and I can tell you that we still have a LONG way to go before >> programming approaches a global optimum in either the semantic or >> syntactic space. > > Aside from messes of installing and setting up language > interpreters/compilers, which are averted by simply having several > pre-installed (I think my Linux boxes come with some Python 2 version, > Perl, bash, and a few others), that isn't really the case. Starting a > Python script is easy. Programming gets convoluted only when, and to > the extent that, the task does.
It is true that program complexity is correlated with problem complexity, language and environment complexity is undeniable. If you want to prove this to yourself, find someone who is intelligent and has some basic level of computer literacy, sit them down at a computer and ask them to solve simple problems using programs. You could even be nice by opening the editor first. Don't help them, just watch them crash and burn. Then sit them in front of code that already works, and ask them to modify it to do something slightly different, and again just watch them crash and burn in all but the simplest of cases. It is painful - most of the time they just give up. These same people almost universally can describe the exact process of steps verbally or in writing to do what is required without any trouble; there might be some neglected edge cases, but if you describe the failed result, often times they will realize their mistake and be able to fix it quickly. Jeff Atwood had an article about programming sheep and non programming goats, and while he views it as a statement about people's failings, I view it as a statement about the failings of programming. Human computer interaction is really important, and the whole prefab GUI concept doesn't scale along any axis; people need to be able to interact with their computers in a flexible manner. In the beginning, we had no choice but to bend our communication to the the machine, but we're moving past that now. The machine should respect the communication of humans. We shouldn't decry natural language because of ambiguity; If we're ambiguous, the machine should let us know and ask for clarification. If we phrase things in a really awkward way, the machine should tell us so, and suggest a more understandable rendition (just like word processors do now). If the machine does something we didn't want based on our instructions, we should be able to state additional requirements in a declarative manner. Restricted natural languages are an active area of current research, and they clearly demonstrate that you can have an expressive formal language that is also valid English. Make no mistake about it, programming is a form of computer human interaction (I figured that would be an accepted mantra here). Think of it as modeling knowledge and systems instead of pushing bits around. You are describing things to the computer. To move from the syntactic domain to my point about programming languages, imagine if one person describes physics to a computer in French, and another person describes chemistry to a computer in English. The creators of the computer made different languages act as disjoint knowledge domains. The computer is incapable of making any inferences in physics which are informed by chemistry, and vice versa, unless someone comes along and re-describes one of the disciplines in the other language. Worse still, if someone that only speaks Mandarin comes along, the computer won't be able to tell him anything about either domain. Now imagine the creators of the computer decided that an acceptable solution was to have people print out statements from one domain in a given language, take it to another computer that scans the printout, translates it to a different language, and prints out the translated copy, then have that person take the translated copy back to the original computer, and scan it again in order to ask a cross cutting question. I hope from that perspective the paucity of our current methods will be more apparent. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
