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Comment by pystack | Hacker News Reader

Once I figure out the difficult specific and rigid details, I just want the most productive way to communicate these details to the computer. Writing code is the most productive, because it is more exact and I am faster typing than drawing/dragging/clicking. For example, with Vim, I can do a quick "Ack def function_name" to find the definition of a function.

For learning purposes, Project Bloks looks great. But when it comes to real work, I'd happily learn the syntax, as it lets me be more productive.

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I agree and I disagree at the same time.

For professional programmers, many people on this forum, the format that we use (text) is almost certainly the most efficient (yet conceived). It's made better with better tooling, of course, like IDEs that help us refactor, show errors in code as we edit, etc.

The author's point is that many more people will be programming in the future (hopefully) than are today. But not as professional programmers. For them, tools like (but not, of course, the same as) Project Bloks will be better.

Hell, we already do this today for ourselves. How many people get into the code-behind on GUIs regularly? Do you detail in code "button x will be placed to the left of button y, the center point between them will be ...". No, we often use some combination of markup language (XML-based like XAML, or something else) or visual designer (that may be generating a markup language version behind the scenes).

Then we connect the dots, the various objects to various actions or data sources, and off we go.

Just like 80% of my (early career) programming was really just gluing together a bunch of data sources for generating reports, much of what businesses need is in the same vein. Relatively (compared to the scale professional programmers like to think of our own work) trivial applications, that exist at a relatively high level (they're not writing a new DB server), connecting pieces together based off logical rules.

From a first principles perspective, it's me and the computer, and I want the computer to do something. My laptop has the following input devices: keyboard, mouse, webcam, and microphone.

I mostly use the keyboard and mouse. There are some places where the mouse is better than the keyboard. I was playing online chess today, and I like to drag and drop the pieces. It feels more natural and not that much slower than inputting the coordinates.

But when I was coding today, I needed to navigate through my code quickly. The mouse would have been much slower than vim's CTRL-D, CTRL-U, and /search_keyword, so I used the keyboard.

For the non-professional programmers, Project Bloks might be more like chess's drag and drop. It's more natural and not that much slower for simple tasks. I can see why non-professional programmers may like it.

How is Project Blocks different than the multiple (rather unsuccessful) failed attempts at graphical (even drag-and-drop) programming languages of the past?

its much faster to put together a functioning system than it was 10 years ago. For example in ROR, install devise and you already have a login system. I imagine things will keep getting incrementally easier / faster until one day we wont need a 'programmer' to do what we want.

google isn't unaware, I'll try not to put words in his mouth, but a google exec said something along the lines that we aren't very far from needing half of the programmers/ IT people we have today

> google isn't unaware, I'll try not to put words in his mouth, but a google exec said something along the lines that we aren't very far from needing half of the programmers/ IT people we have today

In one way, that's a scary idea (a lot of people will end up looking for work elsewhere). On the other, what programmer wants to do the stuff that can be automated away or done by a non-programmer? Or wants to reinvent the wheel because of NIH syndrome?

> what programmer wants to [...] reinvent the wheel because of NIH syndrome?

Almost all of them?

Hard to imagine, when I see all the stories about tiny modules in Node.js...but easy to imagine when I see how many JS frameworks are out there.

Still, so much of what we do these days is just tying together other people's libraries, connecting them together and maybe doing a bit of data conversion. My first step when I need to do something is to find out if someone else already wrote the software. Then I can just install+configure+move on to more interesting things.

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