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One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in my career (past lead designer on Photoshop)(medium.com)

almost 8 years ago from Koen Bok, Maker of Framer.

  • Dan CortesDan Cortes, almost 8 years ago

    Code is a hack like math is a hack. It's not a normative way of thinking, but with practice comes proficiency and mastery. Technology isn't natural by definition, it has to be discovered and learned.

    Also, the different ways of thinking that software development opens you up to is incredible. I'm surprised anyone would want to hide all that behind a GUI for no real reason other than just to do it.

    15 points
    • Thompson GeorgeThompson George, almost 8 years ago

      Additionally, a GUI would severely decrease precision & accuracy, which is required for during development.

      1 point
      • Ryan Snowden, almost 8 years ago

        ... says the film industry, never.

        0 points
        • Thompson GeorgeThompson George, almost 8 years ago

          This sounds like a point from someone that doesn't code. The filmmaker uses this application so he or she doesn't have to manually code it. What do you think the driving force behind the film makers GUI is? What do you think the video is saved as? There will always be a developer that needs to write the application to help those that can't code.

          Find me a SAAS that can pass form data to two instances of SF, another CRM and send that data via email as a fallback. Code isn't going any where anytime soon. Sorry.

          1 point
    • Daniel De LaneyDaniel De Laney, almost 8 years ago

      And just like computers have successfully hidden a great deal of math from us, they'll eventually hide a lot of programming from us, if not all. See also: the singularity.

      I worry that this will take unnecessarily long though, because the people best equipped to bring us into to a post-code world, i.e. programmers, actually like code too much to want to do it.

      0 points
      • Jake Lazaroff, almost 8 years ago

        Have you ever programmed in an assembly language? Moved bits between CPU registers? What about allocating memory in C? I don't think you're being fair to the amount of math computers are already hiding from us.

        It's pretty cushy here in JavaScript-land (or Ruby-land/Python-land/etc), and it's easy to forget that a lot of the nice things we take for granted—like objects and duck typing and garbage collection—didn't always exist, and humans had to deal with these low-level maintenance things instead of just telling the computer what they wanted to happen. Think back just ten years: DOM manipulation involved a lot of complex logic until libraries like jQuery and Prototype made it accessible to everyone.

        In a lot of ways, we're already moving beyond code in the way I think you're envisioning it, too. Apple's toolkit for building iOS apps includes graphical tools for building the interface, where you just drag and drop components the way you want them to appear onscreen. Services like Parse let you build backends without ever writing a line of code. We've actually been down this road with HTML and CSS, too—we had tools like Frontpage and Dreamweaver, but collectively decided that it was better to write our code by hand. We backpedaled away from this code-less future!

        Ultimately, I think, we will move away from code for simple things like building apps. But it'll take time to get there… and there will always be something cooler and more complex that you do need code for.

        2 points
    • Joey Di Nardo, almost 8 years ago

      It's not a normative way of thinking, but with practice comes proficiency and mastery.Technology isn't natural by definition..

      I disagree. The fact that logic completely dominates our reasoning and our decision making coupled with the phenomenon that all computational expressions can be modeled, in the end, using a chain of logical expressions is one of the biggest reasons we think artificial intelligence may one day be able to fully replicate human reasoning and thought.

      The fact we are such logical beings to begin with is a 'hint' that perhaps they are all computational, but we simply possess such a natural genius as to think it's 'not natural by definition'.

      0 points