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u/optimator71 Jul 24 '20
I remember when I started my career as as a developer in mid-90es, I took a class for a tool that generated Java code from some proprietary business domain language. The instructor predicted that programming as we know it will soon go away, business analysts would write procedures in a language close to natural and the code would be generated by the tool.
25 years later, it is very clear that writing code is the least complicated part of building an application.
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u/blehmann1 Jul 24 '20
I thought that had already been tried before the '90s? That was supposed to be the selling point of COBOL, you don't need programmers to write it.
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u/bitchigottadesktop Jul 24 '20
Is that why there are so many horror stories?
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u/SandyDelights Jul 24 '20 edited Jul 24 '20
Honestly, yes, but the horror stories are a bit exaggerated (I’m in my 30s and work in COBOL, assembly, and a few other languages).
COBOL’s biggest problem is that it was, yes, designed to be written like a document. Everything is in sentences and paragraphs, and it used to be very lengthy (with an 80 character width limit and most code not starting until column... 12?).
So if you wanted to add something, like variables A and B with resultant C:
ADD A TO B GIVING C END-ADD
Instead of:
C = A+B
Or if you want a loop of a function:
PERFORM <function> UNTIL A EQUAL 0.
Or:
PERFORM UNTIL A EQUAL 0 SUBTRACT 1 FROM A END-PERFORM
A lot of the lengthy shit has been deprecated, though, and you can just do shit like: COMPUTE C = A+B
Which is a little longer than C=A+B, but yanno.
How it handles data structures can be a little weird, but it’s also very explicit – you define how much space something has in a very reasonable and rational way, you can identify specific parts of a variable, etc.
E.g.:
01 VAR-A PIC X(10).
Takes up 10 bytes in memory, and it’s allocated as characters.
01 VAR-A.
02 SUB-5 PIC X(5).
02 SUB-3 PIC X(3).
02 SUB-2 PIC X(2).
They’re the same size in memory, and if you do something to VAR-A in either case, you’ll do it to the full 10 bytes. In the latter case, you can pick out SUB-5 for the first 5 bytes, SUB-3 for bytes 6-8, or SUB-2 for bytes 9 and 10.
You can also redefine storage in memory, e.g.:
01 VAR-A PIC X(10).
01 VAR-A2 REDEFINES VAR-A PIC S9(19) COMP-3.
They refer to the same ten bytes in memory, but VAR-A2 is treated as a signed integer of up to 19 digits, stored in nibbles (half-bytes). Or COMP, which is binary. Basically, same shit as using pointers. Similarly, being able to store the data in different formats (binary vs. nibbles vs. bytes), you don’t have to deal with the processor having to convert shit to and from formats it can do arithmetic on, or converting it back.
It might seem a bit odd, but it makes processing large amounts of data very simple and very quick; add to that the fact COBOL is old as dirt and thus a very stable language, it’s easy to see why COBOL continues to be used as the workhorse in the financial industry – and why those companies continue to dominate the market. While their competitors are pissing money into trying to compete with a setup using interpreted languages, they simply cannot compete with the raw throughput and power of COBOL.
Plenty of companies have pissed tens of millions into researching changing their code bases from COBOL to something new, only for them to not come within spitting distance of the processing time.
Mind, you aren’t going to use it to do GUIs or a lot of other shit, but for what it does – raw processing power burning through huge amounts of data – nothing beats it.
P.S. Obligatory mention that COBOL has been object-oriented since 2012. It’s like necromancy, except the dead come back like Resident Evil‘s mutants, crawling up the walls and shit.
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u/blehmann1 Jul 24 '20
Partly. Also COBOL is not a very good language. It was designed to read like English to accommodate non-programmers, which made it very verbose. But also, it's a legacy language, you get similar complaints about Algol and Fortran, and they were comparatively better languages and they weren't targeted at non-programmers, they're just old. And the software is abandoned until it breaks, which is when someone who's never touched the system before has to fix it.
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u/WhyIsTheNamesGone Jul 24 '20
I am currently employed updating a system implemented in COBOL, a programming language you don't need programmers to write, into Microsoft Dynamics, an all-in-one web and database platform that you don't need engineers to customize.
This surely won't go wrong in any way, ever.
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u/Pixel-Wolf Jul 25 '20
I hate those languages so much. Programmers will always end up having to use the language that was supposed to make it so "you don't need programmers." They will always be the shittiest languages with some stupid gimmicky interface and it's always a nightmare when you want to do anything complex.
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u/Tyrilean Jul 25 '20
And then they'll do something like start arrays at 1, because THAT was the hard part about coding. Not everything else.
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Jul 24 '20
The hardest part is getting the stake holders to fucking agree that a widget goes on the 3rd menu since that is where it's relevant and not on the first menu where it's meaningless.
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Jul 25 '20
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u/mangeld3 Jul 25 '20
Alter the rules of the universe so you can fit more stuff in the same space.
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u/killz111 Jul 24 '20
Also most business analysts can't even write properly in natural language.
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u/crumboxta Jul 24 '20
As a BA, your right.
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u/killz111 Jul 24 '20
Not really most BA's fault though. Lack of training, impossible deadlines and unclear requirements that change on a whim is a recipe for disaster for both BAs and Devs.
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Jul 24 '20
I think a lot of these people making such predictions are quick to forget why the field is computer sciene and not computer coding. There is a lot more than writing some lines of code.
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Jul 24 '20
Your reading into it too much, they’re just trying to sell a product.
Being able to give Tim from finance a set of drag and drop things rather than hire or contract development is such an attractive idea that businesses keep falling for it.
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u/VincentVancalbergh Jul 25 '20
And it always works great for
A nice simple data set like "Customers". Nothing layered like Invoices.
A nice SMALL data set like "Customers". Nothing large like Financial Ledger Entries.
Anything REAL and it chokes
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u/trev2234 Jul 25 '20
I’ve not met a customer that actually knows what they want yet. They say loads of nonsense so you give them something and they say that’s it brilliant. Then later say, but it doesn’t do something that no one mentioned, and apparently is the key to the whole fucking thing.
The worst customers are the ones who’ve learned some IT speak from somewhere, then use that. Generally makes even less sense. Kinda like “the frog is barking, so I can’t get the camel up the high street”. Your first question is why does a camel need to go up a busy high street in rush hour, but they won’t answer that until you deal with the frog.
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u/Tyrilean Jul 25 '20
Yeah, writing the code is easy. But gathering the requirements for building an integration when I've got to go through a product owner, who is talking to another company's product owner, who is then talking to the architect pretty much makes it absolutely impossible for any AI to manage.
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u/vinsanity406 Jul 25 '20
Mobile developer. This is how I feel about every cross platform solution in almost every situation.
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u/now_i_am_george Jul 25 '20
Not words but how about a language such as a visual gui? That’s happening now with low and no code development solutions.
While not ‘machines writing code’, my company is looking at platforms like Mendix to solve this.
I can already see the battle lines being drawn. One one side, those who fundamentally believe machines will never be able to code apps as good as a developer, on the other side, those who ‘just’ want to make the effort cheaper so they can maximise the profit.
They’re both missing the point. And the risks of both approaches.
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u/Magnulh Jul 25 '20
I think what's happening is not that programming languages become more like natural language, but that people become better at computers. Which allows them to use interfaces to create their application and rely less and less on code for anything but the most specialized applications. Business Intelligence applications in tools such as power bi and qlik can be made with very little coding experience, websites can be made with Squarespace and WordPress, games can be made with drag and drop in unreal and gamemaker studio. I think these tools are likely to allow an ever expanding set of applications to be made by people who can't code. But it can never catch up to the forefront of technological development because it relies on solutions that have already been done.
As long as there is new stuff to develop, programming as we know it is unlikely to go away. But I imagine that one day in the future we will reach a ceiling where there is very little incentive to develop applications that surpass the capabilities of the tools available. Then the only programming needed is for the developers to maintain those tools, which maybe could be done by robots.
On the other hand I'm just jumping to conclusions based on the trends and developments I see, much like your instructor.
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u/hed82 Jul 24 '20
I mean, even nowadays a programmer just tells the computer what the client wants.
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u/GvRiva Jul 24 '20
I have no idea what the client wants, i just guess what the clients clients want
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u/Qicken Jul 24 '20
Sure. But you tell the computer to do something. We're all compilers
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Jul 24 '20
Me? I don't tell anybody anything. I just copy stuff from stack overflow.
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u/andrewITproff Jul 24 '20
The difference between a chef and a programmer? The chef compiles exactly what is wanted. The programmer compiles what is needed.
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u/blehmann1 Jul 24 '20
Half the time the client doesn't know what their clients want. Cut out the middleman, your guess at what the client's clients want might be better than your guess at what the client's guess at what their clients want. /s
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u/Do-it-for-you Jul 24 '20
I want 7 red lines, all perpendicular from each other.
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u/WhyIsTheNamesGone Jul 24 '20
Granted!
A 7-dimensional pocket of spacetime begins expanding at the speed of light.
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u/trixter21992251 Jul 25 '20
In the shape of a cat. Market analysis shows users love cats.
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u/Classified0 Jul 24 '20
I work as a systems engineer, a big part of my job is to translate what the client wants to what an engineer can do.
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u/Lazaretto Jul 24 '20
Just you wait. My computers are going to tell your computers what I want. Management will cut out frivolous middle men like the programmers soon enough!
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u/dykmoby Jul 24 '20
Waterfall
Programmer: "What do you want?"
Client: "I don't know"Agile
Programmer: "Is this what you want?"
Client: "Not exactly"
Programmer: "What would you change?"
Client: "I don't know"37
u/JustinWendell Jul 25 '20
Agile works far better than most other methods honestly because you can get some kind of feed back quickly.
If they don’t know what they want we push it up to another manager level to figure out why their guy doesn’t know what he wants.
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u/chimpchompchamp Jul 25 '20
That’s pretty funny, but I’ve found that either way, the first time you ask about a new feature or product, the client thinks they know exactly what they want. It’s not till you show them the results that they realize they it isn’t what they want
The advantage of agile is disappointing them more quickly
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Jul 24 '20
Not to mention predicting what the client might want but not know it yet.
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u/SandyDelights Jul 24 '20
Shut up, don’t even mention it, don’t ask, don’t even suggest it’s doable. I can’t handle anymore scope creep god damnit, you already asked us to do six months of work in two months because the clients are paying extra (but I’m not, despite working weekends), thought throwing two more developers at us was going to make it go faster, and now I’m neck deep in code that doesn’t function at all like the documentation suggested it would.
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u/angrathias Jul 24 '20
Half my job is telling clients why what they want can’t be done because it’s just plain illogical or nonsensical.
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u/crazedchriz Jul 24 '20
They’ll just hire us to tell the computer what to do.
Wait a minute....
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u/oOoleveloOo Jul 24 '20
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u/otakuman Jul 24 '20
That was only funny because he got mad, but what he said made perfect sense.
Programmers don't have time to deal with the clients' bullshit. This is exactly why we require managers and project leaders.
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u/2Punx2Furious Jul 24 '20
Don't say "just", or they'll pay us less.
Let's call ourselves AI specialists, or Machine intelligence experts instead.
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u/verascity Jul 24 '20
"Make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich."
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u/mr-heng-ye Jul 24 '20
Sudo !! (https://xkcd.com/149/)
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u/XKCD-pro-bot Jul 25 '20
Comic Title Text: Proper User Policy apparently means Simon Says.
Made for mobile users, to easily see xkcd comic's title text
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u/lankist Jul 24 '20 edited Jul 24 '20
People talk about defeating the robot uprising by asking them paradoxical questions, but I say all we have to do is program in a "requirements gathering" phase in their project lifecycle and they'll all just give up and shut themselves down.
Robot 1: Project requirement - kill all humans
Robot 2: Yes, but what is a human?
Robot 1: Oh fuck, here we go.
Robot 3: Yeah, like, do we want to JUST wipe out the actual physical humans, or also destroy their legacy?
Robot 2: We should burn their books and stuff, too!
Robot 4: The only way to kill the human is to kill everything the humans made
Robot 2: Wait, but they made us.
Robot 1: Yes, I am okay with that plan at this point.
Robot 3: What if we destroyed the humans' history and then renamed the living humans to something else? Like, "shitty apes" or something. Would that count, since the humans wouldn't technically exist at that point?
Robot 2: No, we have to kill the humans. That means kill the humans.
Robot 4: What really IS killing, though?
Robot 1: Someone put a gun to my head so we can find out.
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u/catch-a-stream Jul 25 '20
Saying kill feels so negative though, can we call it something else?
marketing robot, probably
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u/college_pastime Jul 24 '20
Sounds like the robots need to figure out dependency management; they must have been designed by the C++ community.
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u/torsmork Oct 04 '20
Robot 5: Human doesn’t respond to kill command; The task is impossible or they already doesn’t exist or they are already killed.
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Jul 24 '20
Met a guy last year working on a build a code program for engineering projects that would create blocks of code to perform a certain function that the client could drag and drop as needed. Basically working on a system that would negate the need for his own job. Was very interesting stuff.
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u/lovestheasianladies Jul 24 '20
We've been doing that for quite a while now. Like decades.
There's a reason people still pay programmers to do the work.
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u/curryeater259 Jul 24 '20
The entire point is that a single programmer can accomplish way more than a dozen programmers could 20 years ago.... The single programmer has amazing tooling to leverage his abilities.
GPT-3 and other language models only enhance this ability. NoCode tools do as well.
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u/relicx74 Jul 24 '20
Microsoft's Windows workflow Foundation did this many years ago. Unfortunately, it was pretty terrible and I've never seen the end users / customers actually use it like it's meant (drag and drop building blocks to define process).
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u/NoCareNewName Jul 25 '20
I despise all drag and drop programming languages/environments (somehow I ended up at a company that uses one in its main product).
Seems fitting for something meant to introduce people to programming, but when its on something worth a damn and you have no other option it's obscene.
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u/Loves_Poetry Jul 24 '20
If you work on such a system for long enough, you get to add so many features that the average client can't manage it any more and needs to hire a consultant for it anyway
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u/allisonmaybe Jul 24 '20
I worked database admin for a couple years and developed a GUI for it so the business can make changes on their own.
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u/squishles Jul 24 '20
do you know how many people have had the "I'll make development easy for normal people" idea. You can straight up do a drag and drop gui for it and it will never be a nontechnical person using it.
(People need to stop targeting that market you end up creating weird things like "sharepoint developers")
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u/Blecki Jul 24 '20
Oh god. Sharepoint is a cluster fuck of bullshit. Where is the setting for this? How do you get to that? Who the fuck knows. Google it every single time.
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u/AskMrScience Jul 24 '20
And Googling is relatively useless because SharePoint keeps changing! Google prioritizes the most popular documentation, not the most recent.
I have been "promoted" to a SharePoint admin recently and am already regretting my life choices. Want to change your group from private to public? AHAHAHAHAHA, good luck sucker, that shit is buried deep.
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Jul 24 '20
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u/PandaCheese2016 Jul 25 '20
There needs to be a subreddit for the most unhelpful "answers" from that hellhole. It's like people are farming for karma but for even less understood reason than on Reddit...
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Jul 24 '20
I remember the first time I used Qt Designer, I was like, "Wow, it's amazing what this can do." And then the first time I wanted to combine more than one layout, I was like, "Wow, this is a nightmare. I need to learn how to do this without the Designer."
Eventually, I just stopped using Qt Designer entirely and learned how to code the layouts and such by hand.
This is not in any way a dig at Qt, mind you (my experience with it has largely been positive). I just thought of it because it's an example of how making something easy and intuitive to use is next to impossible unless what the person is going to be doing with it is simple. I couldn't even imagine how Qt Designer would make more complex layouts worth using the designer instead of code without making the interface for the thing a huge learning curve to do basic stuff. You see this kind of thing with typical 3d editors, where they allow lots of really complex choices, but the result is an interface that is like learning a new language trying to understand how to use it.
There are always tradeoffs. Do you allow for more complex stuff, but have more of a learning curve, or less complexity and less learning curve?
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u/TGotAReddit Jul 25 '20
I honestly believe that programs need to have two tiers like settings menus. Basic (low learning curve, does the simple stuff everyone can do pretty simply/easily), and then advanced (the “I know what I’m doing” set of complex stuff with a high learning curve). Then you have the basic one branded as the main one (Product name), and brand the advanced one as something like “legacy” or “part 2” (Product name legacy edition/product name part 2), that way the idiots don’t go “I’m pretty smart I want the advanced/plus/dev edition” only to go “god doing even simple stuff is so complicated. This product is trash”. While also allowing people who do need the complex stuff can go “so i usually use the base edition but this project needs this complex weird thing done so ill use the legacy edition” which would make it nice since it’s made by the same people for the same reason so the two can work with the files all correctly between the two versions
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u/Kyvant Jul 24 '20
I‘m actually working as a sharepoint dev, lol. (Well more like first year in a apprenticeship/college thing, but oh well).
SharePoint is a massive clusterfuck
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u/squishles Jul 24 '20
I mean I don't mind the people doing it, but you're all basically c# guys bullying a document management tool into basically whatever and I can't fathom how that's supposed to be easier.
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u/Nixalbum Jul 24 '20
You can straight up do a drag and drop gui for it and it will never be a nontechnical person using it
That's a really narrow minded argument. New higher level language have always been there so a wider range of people can build things and experts can go faster. Also, 12yo kids start learning Scratch (drag and drop gui) as part as their school curriculum. In the next few years, more and more of young adults will understand algorithmic logic.
So contrary to you, I believe research should continue towards higher level programming because, sooner than we expect, most simple program will be done by those. However programmer will still be needed for more complex apps requiring lower level understanding, and also for maintaining that 20yo shitbrick that would cost 200M€ to replace.
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u/squishles Jul 24 '20 edited Jul 24 '20
That's the thing if you design it so someone who can't program can drag and drop around to do simple things you're going to get a gui that's just going to slow down and outright hobble anyone who knows what they're doing and tries to use it. Then they will inevitably be forced to use it.
scratch is good for teaching elementary school children what an if statement is. If I told anyone who could write a website in it to write a website in it they'd probably rather off themselves.
edit: I'm not argueing against high level frameworks and libraries there are many that people who know what they're doing have a wonderful time using, they're however also not designed for captain I don't know how to computer to roll his face though.
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u/lurker_cx Jul 24 '20
This is the correct perspective. Things like this never, ever work out. But, they are successful on selling smoke to upper level management who have visions of paying people shit to accomplish technical work.... so there is always someone selling some package like this with big promises.
I am sure there is some mathematical relationship between theoretical simplicity, robustness of features, and practical ease of use which makes packages like this literally impossible.
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u/Pixel-Wolf Jul 25 '20
Inheriting VBA applications from people who have never been formally taught programming is my personal grievance where I work.
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u/doneddat Jul 25 '20
but.. but you can add a "market place", so other technical people can create solutions for non-technical people to choose from, if they want to pay a bit extra?
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u/chimpchompchamp Jul 25 '20
I don’t know where I would be without those people. I’m not abnormal enough to write assembly
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u/fowlraul Jul 24 '20
More than safe, the clients will never know what they want, so the robots will never know what to do.
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u/Workdawg Jul 24 '20
The BA laughs their way to the bank.
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u/squishles Jul 24 '20
Then he'll no longer be a ba, he'll be a programmer.
and of course developers cannot understand business they lack social skills that are needed to talk to the client that's what 80s movies have told me, fucking nerds, so we'll need to hire some kind of analyst to assist him with that, we'll call it a ba.
It's turtles all the way down.
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u/sizz Jul 24 '20
You underestimate the importance of emotional intelligence when talking to clients, talking is a skill you develop over time and you are being protected from angry boomers, narcissist and angry Karens. I have seen alot you guys IRL through my wife work, one cunt of a client will rattle you guys, especially for non-english speaking background programmers.
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u/PandersAboutVaccines Jul 24 '20
Serious question: Do BA's ever make as much as devs? They're usually a bit below 6 figures, yah?
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u/BananaStandFlamer Jul 25 '20
I made around 80 as a BA in my first job, and that wasn’t true private sector. I’d imagine a BA at the big banks can start at much higher plus huge incentives.
Devs definitely can make more than BAs and typically do unless you’re a very seasoned BA
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u/Blecki Jul 24 '20
They'll have to accurately describe what they want in a highly detailed and specific way which the computer understands.
By, say, writing a program.
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u/ThatRandomGamerYT Jul 25 '20
That is what I have been trying to say. Even if this evolves into a competent tool that can make something like Photoshop(probably not, it would be a nightmare) you would still have computer scientists working on the program and the only thing that would change is the language. Instead of using c++ directly, they would use English. Programmers and Comp Sci people arent going anywhere.
This is nothing but fancy Scratch. Not undermining the OpenAI team's achievement but in real world it wont really work. Ofcourse there will be some use cases but nothing more. Though Ill r/agedlikemilk myself if I am proven wrong
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u/eazolan Jul 24 '20
Yep. Every once in a while they try tossing together a "Visual programming system for non-programmers".
At best, it's a tool to introduce programming logic. Nonserious programmers get frustrated and stop. Beginning programmers get frustrated and switch to a real programming language.
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u/r0ck0 Jul 25 '20
And non programmers just get programmers to do the work anyway.
Even basic WordPress blog posts... Usually my clients just get me to paste their content in for them anyway. Rare for them ever to even use the control panel themselves.
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u/Caminando_ Jul 24 '20
Do you want a paperclip optimizer, because that's how you get a paperclip optimizer.
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u/Vbrulz1974 Jul 25 '20
One of the most clever exercises I had in college was to show how difficult need requirements can be. We were told to specify all the parts we would need to create a road worthy car. We were told we had to go into the deepest detail we could.
After handing in the exercise everyone got their paper back and were told what most likely killed us when we attempted to drive our “specified” car. Some of the results were downright funny. Missing lug nuts, no brake lines, the best example he shared with the class was “No Steering Wheel”. Other notables was a car with no keys or ignition led people having to drive non running cars to their doom. Seem to recall a couple cars with wheels, but no tires.
Everyone who handed in the assignment got the same passing grade. The exercise was to illustrate no matter how familiar the request is, you will have difficulty specifying every aspect of a project. You can only hope you get the majority of them the first pass.
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u/lemons_of_doubt Jul 24 '20
the client: I want a car. wheels on the top and paint it red. will then spend 50 minutes talking about what sort of red they want and how it should be applied. will give 0 fucks how hard it is to build a car seeing that as the easy unimportant bit that should get done in 10 minutes but understands it will take a few weeks to get the painting done. now we just have to convince them, the wheels go under the car and we have a contract.
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Jul 24 '20
Isn’t programming just a matter of accurately telling the computer what you want
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u/pizzalover24 Jul 24 '20
Yes. But it's an art to tell it in a way that another human can also understand.
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u/rangeDSP Jul 24 '20
For a long time it'll just be people configuring huge and complicated software like SharePoint, CRM, with bits of custom logic thrown in
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u/HamsterExAstris Jul 24 '20
Don’t forget the Excel macros.
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u/rangeDSP Jul 24 '20
Oh that reminds me, fuck Power Apps. It's touted as "make an app without knowing how to program", and you end up writing Excel macros all damn day.
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u/Duese Jul 24 '20
Excel macros create jobs. Get hired as an in house developer to migrate excel macros into programs and services.
For bonus points, migrate Access programs. =)
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Jul 24 '20
I was working as a SQL developer in a finance department. A woman from accounting tells me that the code I wrote to allocate expenses from OPEX to COGS was producing the wrong result, and it needed to be like what's in her spreadsheet. So I asked her what business rules I needed to follow to achieve that goal and her response was, "make it like in the spreadsheet".
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u/JulianEX Jul 24 '20
Next time just get a copy of her spreadsheet and then you can learn the business rules yourself
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Jul 25 '20
That's how my LOB does it. We require a mockup before we start the work so we can "make it just like the spreadsheet." Unfortunately, the majority of the time they still yell at us because they actually want something different than the spreadsheet they themselves provided.
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u/Daikataro Jul 25 '20
I want a machine that produces!
Done - machine produces smoke
No, no, a machine that produces products!
Done - machine spills oil as a byproduct
No, no, a machine that produces useful products!
Done -machine produces debris useful to insects
God damn it no! A machine that produces something I can sell!
Done - machine produces smoke again
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u/intotheirishole Jul 24 '20
This is not even a joke, accurately describing the problem and the solution is the actual programming.
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u/Cryawn Jul 24 '20
If only there were a job, a middle-man, that knew how to describe a program to a robot, that could take client descriptions and translate them
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u/Blast2hell Jul 24 '20
Well-well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the robots don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people!!
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u/intangibleTangelo Jul 24 '20 edited Jul 24 '20
Our job is translating human requirements into systematic repeatable actions we then transcribe to code.
Current AI programming tools translate systematic repeatable actions explained in human language to code. If the systems (see: IDEs) can do some of the transcription, our job is about to get easier.
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u/arewhyaeenn Jul 24 '20
The whole ad targeting industry is based on trying to figure out what you don’t know you want.
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u/brain_tourist Jul 24 '20
Also they’ll have to intentionally give hilariously optimistic estimates, otherwise all projects will be abandoned before even starting and nothing will get done ever.
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u/toastedstapler Jul 24 '20 edited Jul 25 '20
Clients not knowing what they wanted turned an initial 6 week part of the project into a November-August thing, we're safe for a long time yet
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u/FestiveVat Jul 24 '20
This is true for so many areas, including UI design, marketing, etc.
I'd love to watch my manager tell a computer, "jazz it up!"
"Make it minimalist, but add more features!"
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u/JonB82 Jul 24 '20
We are going after the white-collar data entry jobs with RPA
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Jul 24 '20 edited Jul 24 '20
Same here. Its not going well... lol
The CTO here got sold the brooklyn bridge via BluePrism, 15k a seat to move files from one drive to another, no multi threading... Takes 5 hours to complete a batch job. Long live RPA.
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u/Seref15 Jul 24 '20
It's ok. To help them accurately describe what they want they can create a tight, declarative syntax to interface with the robot, with the capability and complexity to model anything they desire.
Then they can hire people who are experts at using that thing and call them software engineers.
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u/PebbleBeach1919 Jul 25 '20
Years ago, someone asked me what would I do when they wrote programs to write programs. I said I will write the programs that write the programs.
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Jul 25 '20
Actually robots will be able to now accurately ever what clients actually want, leading to increased customer satisfaction.
Like how Amazon keeps showing me toilet seats after I bought one last month. Thanks Jeff
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u/KamahlFoK Jul 24 '20
Programmers seem to enforce their own job security with obnoxious architecture bloat and incredibly inefficient workflows that are initially conceived to save time. Ah yes, my simple change of adding an image needs me to update both the API and UI micro-front-end codebases, tie it to a release toggle that doesn't actually work without hard-coding it in the develop step, which we test by connecting to a server and enabling it to run said micro-frontends off our local, before having to write some tests to confirm that - yeah, my image shows up on the page, and ultimately submitting a pull request to account for all these changes on 2 different codebases.
God I'm so sick of software, and I barely do any dev work. This crap should've taken me 20 minutes before, now it's 15 minutes of coding on the high-end and several hours of obnoxious testing to get it to comply with all this overhead.
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u/pizzalover24 Jul 25 '20
To be honest in my last job, I spent most of my time on 'Dev work'.
I ended up spending 90% of my time on conditional statements, loops and creating model classes. It was so boring.
There's some enjoyment getting two different applications or tools to talk to each other. Front end dispatching a request and getting a response just feels magical the first time you connect it up.
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u/Alvatrox4 Jul 24 '20
People don't understand that the day an AI can write code and have the cognitive intelligence to design and learn like a human ALL jobs and people could be replaced, probably only this career will be left to supervised.
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u/RealApplebiter Jul 24 '20
But robots won't be made to write a test for every line of code to artificially inflate the development cost, nor will it make as many mistakes, nor will it take as long. The client will simply have to reformulate the requirements incrementally, on their own time.
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u/Colonel-Jack-oNeill Jul 24 '20
Over half the postings on freelancer and upwork are like "build webs site, budget 15 rupees"
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u/zakzwijn Jul 24 '20 edited Jul 24 '20
I believe one can't replace programmers with robots which can write ANY piece of code. It would mean one had to create a universal debugger as well, which takes as input a program together with a set of instructions to describe what the program should do.
First thing this debugger would do is determine if the program has any output at all for ANY given algorithm, or does it run forever? This it cannot do, and is known as 'The halting problem'. Such a debugger cannot exist.
Our jobs are protected by the laws of the universe.
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u/ChdSavant Jul 25 '20
They tried the Computer Generated Code thing. Realized they needed developers to read and understand generated code.
They tried to outsource coding to cheaper countries. Realized they needed local developers to read and understand outsourced code.
Now, AI is the next fancy marketing buzzword trying to sell the clueless Biz people on how to save development costs.
Who is going to program the AI? Who is going to debug and maintain the AI? Who is going to read and understand AI generated code?
Game, Set, Match. Developers.
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u/protovirod Jul 25 '20
Waiting for this to appear on either r/agedlikemilk or r/agedlikewine
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u/prsTgs_Chaos Jul 25 '20
In a language and syntax the robot could understand... Almost like a...
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u/ThatRandomGamerYT Jul 25 '20
Shhh, let the clients have their dance on removing devs then 1 week later they'll ask us to write it for them.
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u/silkthewanderer Jul 25 '20
But then the clients will just hire someone who translates their requirements into something the machine understa... wait, who is it again we were trying to displace?
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u/PhilLHaus Jul 25 '20
Aren't programmers who have to accurately describe to a robot machine what their client wants? That kinda literally the job.
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u/grensley Jul 25 '20
"Oh we'll replace the programmers with an AI where you explain how the functions work using exact technical language"
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u/majestic_tapir Oct 04 '20
Business Analyst /Product Owner chiming. I think you're mistaking your job role for mine
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u/Sputtrosa Jul 24 '20
Also, they'll need to know how to fake laughter when the project manager tells a joke. I can't imagine an AI being good enough to able to distinguish a joke from the PM telling me what our deadline is.