The Future of Programming

It's a fun talk by Bret and I think he echoes a lot of the murmurings that have been going around the community lately. It's funny that he latched onto some of the same core tenants we've been kicking around, but from a very different angle. I started with gathering data on what makes programming hard, he looked at history to see what made programming different. It's a neat approach and this talk laid a good conceptual foundation for the…

Why does everyone seem to believe this talk is about the fact that these problems were "solved" decades ago? My takeaway is that, no, these things weren't solved, they were abandoned. We got tunnel vision and decided that a handful of ideas were what programming is, rather than just a tiny subset. This talk isn't about how the early programmers were better at everything, if anything it's the opposite, that we should question their decisions and not take anything for…

Goal oriented programming is alive and well in SQL. Visual programming comes around every ten years, and fails each time, because it can't deal with large complexity like text can. There is a reason people write books, not comics, especially for advanced topics! Negotiating without a common ontology is needlessly hard, and doesn't come up in real use cases. It turns out, when you need to talk to another computer, you need to do that for very specific reasons. (Also…

What speaks to me about this is how it was presented before LLMs, yet many concepts still apply. For example > Learn tools, and use tools, but don't accept tools. Always distrust them; always be alert for alternative ways of thinking. In his closing remarks he says, "The most dangerous thought you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you're doing," because you stop being open and receptive to new ways of thinking and doing…