Coding Is Over | Hacker News Reader

Coding Is Over

medium.com

18 pointsprostoalex14 comments

"GraphQL will completely replace REST in the coming years." What the hell? Where's your source for that?

She says the solution is that product managers should be able to make an app do whatever they want to do and skip the engineers. This makes her sound very inexperienced. Don't you think we would have gotten there by now if possible?

So her new mission is to create a drag and drop interface that can build every app every company would ever want, and she doesn't have a clue how to do it "but probably with React." Nice.

Does she think the only thing requiring code are websites? Does she think we can just drag and drop Google search algorithms and space shuttle software into existence?

This almost seems like a troll article.

> Does she think we can just drag and drop Google search algorithms and space shuttle software into existence?

To be honest, I'd say a good 80% of websites are a variation around the same theme: authenticate a user and let them CRUD resources following a pretty standard access model. I guess OP would like to see an easy solution for all these websites that does 80% of the job of such an application, and let the user configure the fine details of how resources are displayed rather than code how layers are going to interact between each other, even though this interaction is pretty much already known.

Of course, you won't be able to do that "with React", much like you won't be able to do that "with MongoDB" only, that was a bit short-sighted. And of course a generic stack won't be able to scale to the size of Twitter or Instagram or Reddit. Which means that engineering time should be spent on scaling, not on gluing your Express application with your React frontend for the n-th time.

So her new mission is to create a drag and drop interface that can build every app every company would ever want, and she doesn't have a clue how to do it "but probably with React." Nice.

Solve coders recreating the same things over and over, by coding the next rapid application development environment. Sorry, sorry, the first RAD. Of course.

I am pretty sure it is satire. It has to be, right?

> When many products are essentially the same app with different color schemes and copy, why are we still coding?

Self driving cars, virtual and augmented reality, the automation of everything, consumer level fabrication, the explosion of machine learning and data science into everywhere... I think there is plenty of room in the world for more code!

Such clickbait. "Coding" will never be over. We've come along way from punch cards and it will continue to be abstracted further and further.

Abstracted further and further, up to the point where someone without programming experience can tell a computer to do the thing it should do, making "coding" (or at least how we know it now) redundant. Have you thought about it this way?

Actually abstracted further and further until AI takes over and they meet. That is the moment coding will be over.

Previously submitted here (over the past four days):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11957926

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11957544

Clickbait-y headline. But the author makes some valid points. Software engineering is in the end just problem solving. And re-implementing already resolved issues from scratch does not a good engineer make. (And by that I mean in a professional context, not in the beginning for purely educational purposes. I learned web dev by re-writing a simple Twitter clone from scratch and still recommend that as the best way to get one's feet wet.)

There are untold opportunities to make the tools we use to build software more capable and reduce the cognitive load that a large code base imposes on it's engineering team. The next few years should be interesting.

The thing is the problems are never solved. They might be solved in one way, for one given case, but problems can't be generalised at that scale.

Just look at the tyres. You use different width, different patterns for different road types, per season. And the industry is still evolving!

Even a programming language can't fit to all scenarios!

> My current undertaking is to build an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface.

We tried that in the 90's with Rapid Application Development (RAD), massive code-gen, and clunky workflow abstraction tools.

It didn't work. Coders simply cannot be replaced easily with power user's tools.

Unless you are building a product that is not differentiated in any way from your competitors. (Cost, functionality, services.. etc.) But if not, then how do you hope to stay in business?

Wix and Squarespace are nice, but lets acknowledge they are targeting a completely different market than corporate startups.

> This makes her sound very inexperienced.

https://medium.com/@loorinm/becoming-a-software-engineer-is-... She was admitted to "Hack Reactor" in October 2015. Well that escalated quickly.

Whoa, that crosses the line. If you think someone is wrong, explain why substantively, not by digging up details from their résumé. Your snarky swipe at the end is particularly distasteful. Please don't do that when commenting here.

Edit: I see that we've had to warn you about this before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11624990). This is really not ok for this site, so if you do it again we will ban you.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11981661 and marked it off-topic.

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