The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant
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@polygeekery said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
cuisine
We have poutine though, that has to count for something.
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@apapadimoulis - Can I get permission to republish?
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@polygeekery said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
American culture, English cuisine, and French technology.
They are missing German humor and Italian durability
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@gąska said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
there are things that people without deep programming knowledge simply cannot and will never be able to do (without acquiring deep programming knowledge in the process).
Possibly; but none of them relevant to the day-to-day work of 99.9% of people. Possibly this is true if you're planning a new space probe for NASA. Possibly.
I don't have the "deep programming knowledge" required to create the Photoshop context-aware fill tool, but once one person has done that everybody else just has to select "context-aware fill" from the menu.
@gąska said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
The difference between a GUI tool that lets you do something without programming knowledge and a GUI tool that lets you make GUI tools without programming knowledge is in lines of code.
You're missing many points.
The point isn't that people should be able to do things with "no knowledge" (what does that even mean?), the point is that the tools should be usable and discoverable enough so that they teach the user how to use them, as the user is using them.
@gąska said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Both are made by Real Programmers for the purpose of Non Programmers being able to do useful things with computers, and the capabilities of both tools are limited by the foresight of original developers about possible uses of their software.
They are now possibly, but they don't have to be. This isn't some rule of God laid down in stone tablets.
HyperCard could be extended with compiled functions, many packages of those were commercially available, many of them extremely technologically sophisticated. And yet the user commanded that power using the same HyperTalk language they used to move a button around.
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@luhmann said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@polygeekery said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
American culture, English cuisine, and French technology.
They are missing German humor and Italian durability
..and Zimbabwe currency.
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@wharrgarbl said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@apapadimoulis said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
we’re seeing world-class tools like Visual Studio be replaced with wooooooowiiee-I-can-hack-a-text-editor-in-javasrcript-guuuuyzzzz garbage like Atom, Visual Studio Code, etc.
while we struggle with cheap/free shitty tools they spend millions on oracle enterprisey shit.
Yeah, fuck Oracle right in their holes.
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@raceprouk said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@yamikuronue said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Does nobody fucking bottom-post email threads anymore? So you can read them in order?
IME, people always top-post when replying to emails, because that seems to be the default for pretty much every email client ever.
And I use the default, because if I didn't, it's just piss off everyone else.Also, that's because you're email client is supposed to pull all of these emails together into a nice little thread
Also, because why would anyone want to scroll through possibly hundreds of lines of previous replies?
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@kt_ said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Also, because why would anyone want to scroll through possibly hundreds of lines of previous replies?
...and thousands of lines of signatures telling you to delete it if you are not the intended recipient.
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@polygeekery said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@kt_ said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Also, because why would anyone want to scroll through possibly hundreds of lines of previous replies?
...and thousands of lines of signatures telling you to delete it if you are not the intended recipient.
Oh yeah. I have such a signature, too! I mean, my work e-mail, but still -- I do!
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@polygeekery said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@kt_ said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Also, because why would anyone want to scroll through possibly hundreds of lines of previous replies?
...and thousands of lines of signatures telling you to delete it if you are not the intended recipient.
Or people with gigantic pictures/walls-of-text as signatures? I got one once from someone--it was two screens long. The actual content of the email: "Thanks!" or something like that.
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@benjamin-hall said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@polygeekery said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@kt_ said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Also, because why would anyone want to scroll through possibly hundreds of lines of previous replies?
...and thousands of lines of signatures telling you to delete it if you are not the intended recipient.
Or people with gigantic pictures/walls-of-text as signatures? I got one once from someone--it was two screens long. The actual content of the email: "Thanks!" or something like that.
I get those all the time. One of our clients even had a group of idiots (one of their departments) that put 600px tall Minions pictures in their signatures.
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@blakeyrat said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@gąska said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
there are things that people without deep programming knowledge simply cannot and will never be able to do (without acquiring deep programming knowledge in the process).
Possibly; but none of them relevant to the day-to-day work of 99.9% of people.
99.9% of people that use computer at work, use some kind of email client. And most of them use some kind of text processor and, from time to time, spreadsheets. Also some kind of program specific to their job that they would be unable to make themselves.
I don't have the "deep programming knowledge" required to create the Photoshop context-aware fill tool, but once one person has done that everybody else just has to select "context-aware fill" from the menu.
You do have deep programming knowledge required to implement that feature - you just lack domain knowledge to figure out the specifics of the algorithm. And we both know that if you were working on Phitoshop for some time already, you'd have the domain knowledge.
The point isn't that people should be able to do things with "no knowledge" (what does that even mean?), the point is that the tools should be usable and discoverable enough so that they teach the user how to use them, as the user is using them.
Do you want to integrate programming tutorial into UI? TDEMSYR
They are now possibly, but they don't have to be. This isn't some rule of God laid down in stone tablets.
Programming is basically automation of tasks. Simple automation can be done with simple tools and no knowledge. But advanced stuff requires advanced algorithmics knowledge (so you can figure out what exactly you want to do) and sufficiently versatile tools (you can't do in Word what you can easily do in Excel, not without extensive VBA scripting).
HyperCard could be extended with compiled functions, many packages of those were commercially available, many of them extremely technologically sophisticated. And yet the user commanded that power using the same HyperTalk language they used to move a button around.
Because someone did the hard part for them. What would it take from average HyperTalk user to replicate these compiled extensions in HyperTalk?
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@polygeekery said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Minions pictures
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@luhmann yep.
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@gąska said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Also some kind of program specific to their job that they would be unable to make themselves.
... but only because all the products used for software development are so fucking difficult to use, not because of some God-ordained law of nature.
That's kind of my exact point.
@gąska said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Do you want to integrate programming tutorial into UI? TDEMSYR
Do you have an actual non-knee-jerk reason?
Why doesn't it make sense for a program designed to help people write software teach people how to write software?
Vegas is a program designed to help people edit video, and it comes with extensive tutorials and videos demonstrating not only how to use the product, but in a lot of cases the art of film editing. You could edit a Hollywood picture, and do a better job than whoever Michael Bay's got working for him, just by reading all the supporting material that comes with Vegas.
Why is that a good idea when a video editing tool does it and a bad idea when a programming tool does it? Explain.
@gąska said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Simple automation can be done with simple tools and no knowledge.
It used to be so, but now we've (as an industry) stopped making/supporting products like WSH and AppleScript also, so, no, we're back-sliding there, also. Scripting now means entering the CLI hell of PowerShell.
@gąska said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
But advanced stuff requires advanced algorithmics knowledge (so you can figure out what exactly you want to do) and sufficiently versatile tools (you can't do in Word what you can easily do in Excel, not without extensive VBA scripting).
I don't get your "basic" vs. "advanced" split here. You can easily do anything in Word that you can do in Excel, and vice-versa, because while the IT universe is utter shit, OLE Object Embedding still works here in 2017. So you can just shove a "Word" into your Excel document, that still works.
@gąska said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Because someone did the hard part for them.
That's the brilliant thing about our industry: a hard problem only has to be solved once, EVER, and it's solved for good. Well, in theory. In reality, nope, nothing works that way.
The open source-y people kind of claim to, but nobody can figure out how the fuck their shit works, and they refuse to let you embed it where it'd be useful, so.
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@polygeekery
Seems it works for forum signatures too ...
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@blakeyrat said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Why doesn't it make sense for a program designed to help people write software teach people how to write software?
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@kt_ said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Sure, you can use Slack. For teams. It's not a "hey, man, wanna grab a beer?" or "hey, girl, wanna go the movies and then fuck"-kinda communicator.
Some of my friends use it for personal group chats. Blech.
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@blakeyrat said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@gąska said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Also some kind of program specific to their job that they would be unable to make themselves.
... but only because all the products used for software development are so fucking difficult to use, not because of some God-ordained law of nature.
That's kind of my exact point.
Software development tools may be more difficult to use than they need to be, but you're not going to convince me that software development can be simplified and made accessible beyond a certain point. I certainly wouldn't expect to be able to simplify quantum mechanics to a point where anyone who gets bored at their job can master it in a few hours. Some fields of study are just inherently complex, and software development is one of those fields.
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@masonwheeler The existence of a bad and annoying tutorial system doesn't invalidate the idea of a tutorial system.
I think there is a lot more that could be done to make programming tools more welcoming and learnable, but the programmers who make them tend to be a bit elitist and don't like the idea of just anyone realising how easy a lot of it is once you've learned the shitty tooling
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@asdf A couple years. I remember trying right as they broke it.
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@jaloopa Amen.
Not everyone has what it takes to be a genius programmer, but not everyone has what it takes to be a genius anything.
It's our fault, to a large extent, that programming has the stigma of difficulty its got now.
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@blakeyrat said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Back in the 1990s, we had accountants or doctors or auto mechanics taking a look at software like HyperCard or Filemaker or Access or maybe even Visual Basic and saying "well, hell, I can make my own software for my needs..." In fact, all of the most commercially successful HyperCard programs were made by people who were not trained as programmers.
An easily accessible programming environment is a laudable goal, however it is much more difficult to do it now, because of new features that people expect from software.
HyperCard was operating on disk files on a single machine.
In modern software, people require at least some of the following:- data accessible on multiple devices, by multiple users (members of the organization, customers)
- web interface, working on mobile devices, over unreliable connections
- permission control
- security against hacking
- backups
- guarantee of reliability (that the shop does not charge you 100x the price of product because of a software error)
- polished UI (you should know about that :) )
It would be great to have an environment making these easy to do, but that is a massive project.
Corporations have no motivation to make it, because they get more profit from subscriptions to cloud services. Private developers don't have the power to build something that big.The one place where such tools are being created is game development, for example Unreal Engine with its visual scripting, GUI manager for all your assets, a repository of assets you can import. But the specialization for games makes these not viable for the general case.
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@sloosecannon said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
I think the kids nowadays (at least in the US) use crap like Snapchat and Instagram and crap...
Anything to make it more about ME ME ME.
Social media is like everyone standing on their own street corner with a megaphone.
Not quite sure why we bother adding "media" to it. Should just call it Public Media.
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@magus said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@jaloopa Amen.
Not everyone has what it takes to be a genius programmer, but not everyone has what it takes to be a genius anything.
It's our fault, to a large extent, that programming has the stigma of difficulty its got now.
I remember hearing in high someone remarking. "This is coding? I thought it would be drawing lines between boxes by now".
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@blakeyrat said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@gąska said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Also some kind of program specific to their job that they would be unable to make themselves.
... but only because all the products used for software development are so fucking difficult to use, not because of some God-ordained law of nature.
No. Programming is hard because the maths behind it is hard. And by maths, I don't mean algebra, but the theory behind algorithmics, finite automata, type systems, decision making etc. By deep programming knowledge, I meant basics of these and related branches of mathematics, plus practical knowledge of applying design patterns to quickly develop performant and reliable software.
GUI won't teach you maths, no matter how great it is.
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@blakeyrat said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
That's the brilliant thing about our industry: a hard problem only has to be solved once, EVER, and it's solved for good.
But you have to do this for each and every hard problem there is. And every industry has entirely different set of problems to solve. That's why your claim that this one piece of software from the 80s could make programmers mostly obsolete is utter bullshit.
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@gąska said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
No. Programming is hard because the maths behind it is hard. And by maths, I don't mean algebra, but the theory behind algorithmics, finite automata, type systems, decision making etc. By deep programming knowledge, I meant basics of these and related branches of mathematics, plus practical knowledge of applying design patterns to quickly develop performant and reliable software.
GUI won't teach you maths, no matter how great it is.
Fortunately they teach all of this in PROGRAMMING BOOTCAMPS now, right between the "refaffing your Git cherry pick ref heads" and "injection dependency with npm bootstrap CSS loaders" classes.
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@masonwheeler Millions of people loved Clippy.
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@apapadimoulis said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Fortunately they teach all of this in PROGRAMMING BOOTCAMPS now, right between the "refaffing your Git cherry pick ref heads" and "injection dependency with npm bootstrap CSS loaders" classes.
Exactly.
We spend more time on patterns that seem awfully repetitive, and less time on solving the actual problems.
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@thecpuwizard said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@apapadimoulis - Can I get permission to republish?
Wow. That's as old-fashioned as usable software.
You're supposed to blockquote the entire thing now, come up with a more click-baity title, put a link at the way bottom, and share it on your MEDIUM.
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@blakeyrat said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@masonwheeler Millions of people loved Clippy.
[citation needed]
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@gąska said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
But you have to do this for each and every hard problem there is.
Not just this.
We argue over the ways to solve the problems, and then customers worry too much about implementation details.
Then there's making the software fit the hardware build for those niche problems.
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@lb_ said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Software development tools may be more difficult to use than they need to be, but you're not going to convince me that software development can be simplified and made accessible beyond a certain point.
Could we maybe try to reach that point then?
Right now, we're further from it than we were in 1997.
@lb_ said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Some fields of study are just inherently complex, and software development is one of those fields.
Software development also has the unique power to make itself less complex. Software developers just don't bother doing it.
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@lb_ said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
you're not going to convince me that software development can be simplified and made accessible beyond a certain point.
You're conflating "all software development for every problem ever" and "simplified software development to handle most problems or allow people to tweak their solution for personal preference".
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@kt_ said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
The point is, I never could get used to the electronic tools and their inability to bend to my will. I guess there's stuff that is just easier to use with simple combination of pen and paper instead of a fucking computer.
We recently switched all of our company planning to index cards and whiteboards; then we take a picture of it. It's amazing how much easier and functional it is.
Now, of course, I can't email the picture to the team, because some stupid OFfice 2016/365 setting wants us to share the photo with either Delve or OneNote, neither of which seem to work on our Win 10 (Creators Edition??) laptops. So we print the pictures and give to team members. Actually, that's better.
Then, someone else, can write up the notes in a word document, and send it to the team. for now. But printing and handing out is much easier.
Our system works well, but the main issue we have right now is penmanship. I only know how to write legibly in ALL CAPS any more, and some members of the team can't write at all. But I think that's going to be easier to fix than software.
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@adynathos said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
An easily accessible programming environment is a laudable goal, however it is much more difficult to do it now, because of new features that people expect from software.
I don't see that as a particularly difficult problem to solve, but ok.
@adynathos said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
HyperCard was operating on disk files on a single machine.
Right; and right now in 2017 we don't have any programming environments operating on disk files (as opposed to what BTW?) on a single machine that are as easy to use as HyperCard was. That's why I keep saying we've moving BACKWARDS. Because we are.
Sure maybe people "expect more" now in 2017, but we're not even meeting those old fashioned 1997 expectations!
@adynathos said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
It would be great to have an environment making these easy to do, but that is a massive project.
Everything worth doing is difficult. One of the things I hate most about the whole open source mindset is that you constantly hear "oh we didn't do that because it's difficult" or "that feature would take too much time to get right". It's like they want preschool software development for babies.
@adynathos said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Private developers don't have the power to build something that big.
The power's there, the drive's missing.
@adynathos said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
The one place where such tools are being created is game development, for example Unreal Engine with its visual scripting, GUI manager for all your assets, a repository of assets you can import. But the specialization for games makes these not viable for the general case.
Yeah, actually I slot Unreal in with the "good guys" because they've been simultaneously making their program:
- Faster
- More powerful (more features)
- Easier to use
Every single version. It's great proof that this shit is definitely possible, look, there's a guy doing it!
@gąska said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
No. Programming is hard because the maths behind it is hard.
There's no math "behind" programming. (What does "behind" even mean in this context?)
@gąska said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
And by maths, I don't mean algebra, but the theory behind algorithmics, finite automata, type systems, decision making etc.
You don't need any of that shit to build 99.9% of the software I've used in my lifetime. In fact, software that makes a big deal about using mathematical terms, like Git with its "acyclic directed graph" are usually shitty and terrible.
@gąska said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
By deep programming knowledge, I meant basics of these and related branches of mathematics,
I don't know any of those branches of mathematics, and I write fine software.
@gąska said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
plus practical knowledge of applying design patterns to quickly develop performant and reliable software.
Two points here:
- Again, that's teachable, and it's teachable by the software itself, if people bothered
- If you're arguing that existing programmers have all this math knowledge (demonstrably false) and produce performant and reliable software (demonstrably false) I have to wonder what universe you live in, because it's sure as fuck not the one I'm in.
@gąska said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
That's why your claim that this one piece of software from the 80s could make programmers mostly obsolete is utter bullshit.
Please quote where I claimed that.
Oh I guess maybe the alternative-me said that in the universe where software is performant and reliable. Well, I'm in this universe, and I never made the claim you seem to think I have.
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@apapadimoulis said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
But I think that's going to be easier to fix than software.
You're halfway there with paint.exe and gmail, though.
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@blakeyrat said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
You don't need any of that shit to build 99.9% of the software I've used in my lifetime.
Or you do, and it's been successfully abstracted away from needing to ever touch it again.
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I spent two hours this morning figuring out my fucking build chain before I could write so much as a line of code.
Fuck programming. I'm going to run away and become a dog trainer.
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@xaade said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Or you do, and it's been successfully abstracted away from needing to ever touch it again.
Thus proving my point exactly.
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By the way, I sat through a product demo this morning where someone's finally done what I've been saying we should do for years: they put a nice, human-friendly interface on top of Webdriver so that your BA can actually put together automated tests. This is for an ERP system, so they already know every control that can possibly exist, and know how to detect which ones are on the page. You open the page in your browser and it says "here's the controls, which one do you want to interact with" and you tell it what data to enter and define your custom workflow thusly.
But for some reason, it's a fucking SaaS product and they want to ship all your test information into the cloud. So close.
Still, there's no reason you can't make something that simple for developing simple, GUI-based applications. "I want a textbox, a date picker, and a submit button, and you're going to put the data into a storage somewhere, and later spit it back out on this page after doing math to it."
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@yamikuronue said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
"I want a textbox, a date picker, and a submit button, and you're going to put the data into a storage somewhere, and later spit it back out on this page after doing math to it."
Of course you can.
At my first company...
I wrote a program that scraped our old MFC screens and built WPF ones to replace them, and used compiled XAML instead of the old compiled MFC config. Threw the same driving code behind it, and it worked. Kinda. The screens would have to be tweaked because pixels changed since then, but it worked.
I got the idea from my coworker, who wrote a program that used the captured events from our bug reporting to automated replay the users actions on our side to see if the bug was fixed.
We used our customer's actions to create regression UI testing.
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@xaade said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@lb_ said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
you're not going to convince me that software development can be simplified and made accessible beyond a certain point.
You're conflating "all software development for every problem ever" and "simplified software development to handle most problems or allow people to tweak their solution for personal preference".
There's already plenty of languages like Python that fall in the latter category, and you'd be hard pressed to find something that doesn't fall in the first category due to the way turing-completeness works. If you're suggesting there's a difference in complexity between some AutoHotkey scripts and a physics simulation library, I agree completely, but I don't agree that you can easily create both from scratch with a single simplified tool. I'm not saying simplified tools cannot exist because programming is hard, I'm saying you can't simplify everything to the same level of complexity.
@blakeyrat said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
That's the brilliant thing about our industry: a hard problem only has to be solved once, EVER, and it's solved for good.
I completely disagree. This implies that most if not all problems have a single best solution after which there can be no improvement.
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@yamikuronue said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Does nobody fucking bottom-post email threads anymore? So you can read them in order?
I long for the days when people were told to reply properly and not in the Outlook manner …
@raceprouk said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
that seems to be the default for pretty much every email client ever.
I later found out that Microsoft has been promoting top-replying pretty much since they first began including mailers with their OS.
Edit: Ah, here’s the proof that I scanned some years ago for someone else when talking about this very subject:
This is from the Dutch-language manual for Windows for Workgroups 3.11. ‘’Typ hier uw antwoord” means “Type your reply here”.
Unfortunately, they seem to have won that battle fairly quickly. Before Outlook and its ilk became popular, I never saw top-replies at all, despite being on several popular mailing lists at the time (100+ messages a day through one was not out of the ordinary, this back in the mid-’90s).
And I use the default, because if I didn't, it's just piss off everyone else.
I don’t. Fuck ’em.
@kt_ said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
Also, because why would anyone want to scroll through possibly hundreds of lines of previous replies?
With bottom-replying, the idea is that you delete the bits of the message that you’re not specifically replying to. Together, that makes conversations easy to follow even if you don’t have all the messages to read back (because who had the disk space to keep hundreds of messages a day back then anyway?).
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@lb_ said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
I don't agree that you can easily create both from scratch with a single simplified tool. I'm not saying simplified tools cannot exist because programming is hard, I'm saying you can't simplify everything to the same level of complexity.
Why do you think anyone here has suggested you could?
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@lb_ said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
I completely disagree. This implies that most if not all problems have a single best solution after which there can be no improvement.
Yeah, for that to work, computers would have to run on math.
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@xaade Then I guess we agree and I've been misreading this entire thread.
@magus said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
@lb_ said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
I completely disagree. This implies that most if not all problems have a single best solution after which there can be no improvement.
Yeah, for that to work, computers would have to run on math.
There are multiple solutions to problems even in math.
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@lb_ said in The "Good news, everybody: we’re safe from Skynet!" Rant:
I completely disagree. This implies that most if not all problems have a single best solution after which there can be no improvement.
You have to have a damn good reason to implement a better linked list.
I think you're misunderstanding the scope of the complaint here.
"We had this tool that could do most of what people needed, and left manual labor to the really hard problems. That tool didn't keep up with the times, and if it had, it would have covered even more area than it did back then. Therefore, we've lost ground on simplifying programming."