“The “Promise” of “Easier” Programming,” wherein I talk about why 4GLs were temporarily successful, why that was temporary, and why “programming via LLMs” will have the same fate: https://eschatologist.net/blog/?p=374
Notices by Chris Hanson (eschaton@mastodon.social)
-
Embed this notice
Chris Hanson (eschaton@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 31-Jul-2023 01:25:52 JST Chris Hanson -
Embed this notice
Chris Hanson (eschaton@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 29-Jul-2023 08:23:23 JST Chris Hanson @thomasfuchs All of that was *a lot* more maintainbale and discoverable than modern rats’ nests of LabView diagrams; LabView mostly won that market on the cost and ubiquity of PC hardware while still interoperating with existing GPIB deployments, not by being better. (And Rocky Mountain BASIC was a solid structured BASIC, not a toy BASIC like on microcomputers.)
-
Embed this notice
Chris Hanson (eschaton@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 29-Jul-2023 08:23:23 JST Chris Hanson @thomasfuchs An enormous amount of factory automation and instrumentation was created in the 1980s using “Rocky Mountain BASIC” on HP 9000-series GPIB instrumentation controllers. (This is what HP’s 68000-based HP 9000-200/300/400 systems were the fanciest versions of.
-
Embed this notice
Chris Hanson (eschaton@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 29-Jul-2023 08:23:22 JST Chris Hanson @thomasfuchs This is one of the things that’s also doomed environments like Smalltalk; plain text has some very, *very* important benefits when used for programming, particularly in the form of long-term maintainability, interoperability, portability, and interoperability. Maintaining one or more “environment” systems over time is much more difficult, simply because comparing between variants is incredibly complex and often not possible except within the system itself.
-
Embed this notice
Chris Hanson (eschaton@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 29-Jul-2023 08:15:26 JST Chris Hanson @thomasfuchs Except—you can! There were large numbers of complex business applications built in Prograph and Sirius Developer, and lots of instrumentation is still built around LabView.
-
Embed this notice
Chris Hanson (eschaton@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 29-Jul-2023 08:15:25 JST Chris Hanson @thomasfuchs The problem with “graphical programming will save us all” is that it tried to optimize the wrong problem: Textual programming complexity. Yes, people have varying levels of difficulty when it comes to using text to program, and some of that is caused by needless complexity in language and environment design. However, a complex application is still a complex application regardless of whether it’s written with Prograph or Swift.
-
Embed this notice
Chris Hanson (eschaton@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Feb-2023 11:57:21 JST Chris Hanson @thomasfuchs There was a cylinder too!