The future of programming is visual | Hacker News Reader

The future of programming is visual

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1 pointadamlagreca7 comments

35 years ago I was getting into coding for the first time on Commodore Pets and ZX81. I read about The Last One [1] in the computing press in 1981 and thought that maybe the world won't need programmers. Well, the world needs programmers more than ever, since demand for software is only increasing. It's nice to hear that the dream of user generated systems is still alive. We've had many iterations, from the The Last One, through Hypercard, Fabrik, Scratch. It's a powerful vision, which is why people keep chasing it. But it can only address well defined niches. Of course we have had a very powerful end user software authoring system for some time. It uses a visual, grid based, functional programming system and has powerful database and charting features. It's called Excel.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1293278/what-became-of-th...

Saying that visual programming is the future is like saying that comic books will eventually replace all that boring 'tl;dr' walls of text.

The truth is - people think in text. Visual abstractions are only suitable for a tiny subset of things we're thinking about, and the rest is just too complex to be expressed in anything but a natural, complex language.

Yes, we think in text or, more accurately, a language. But only a small percentage of us can think in code, yet software businesses will continue to come online at exponential momentum. Having visual, drag and drop components is more universally accessible. If computers actually began to understand how we think (and by "we" I mean including those of us who aren't engineers), then the future of innovation is open to everyone and that's ultimately the vision of Bubble.

> But only a small percentage of us can think in code

We always think in code. A plan for a day is a code (and nobody ever use graphical diagrams for it). A cooking recipe is a code (plain text, never a diagram). A legal document is a code (I wish some of them were diagrams, but a plain and unobfuscated English would have been even better). Pretty much any form of communication is code. A one-dimensional sequence of words.

Yes, the existing coding languages are crap, they are simply not abstract enough and not flexible enough. And this is what must be fixed. Representing the same broken abstractions, but this time in 2D diagrams, won't fix anything, or even make things worse. Been there already, with flow charts and all that.

This article is terrible. No, a "Bubble" programmer couldn't have made Facebook back in the day. The vast majority of the difficulty in programming doesn't lie in the representation of code, but in the actual underlying problems you're trying to solve -- and in knowing whether computers can solve them at all, and how. Textual code is not the problem here.

Bubble is either too limited (meaning no, you cannot build the next Facebook with it) or simply a visual skin over the fundamental problem that is software development. If Bubble is powerful enough, then not anyone will be able to use it to build complex systems, no matter how fancy the colorful UI you slap over it.

It's as if the author of the article thought the complexity of Facebook lies in choosing which color to use for the "like" button...

The future of programming could be more visual, but still very textual. It's not a binary decision to make.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10233410

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