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Re: Is there a future for codeless software?

by davido (Cardinal)
on Jun 03, 2019 at 15:01 UTC ( [id://11100876]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Is there a future for codeless software?

Haven't we seen this future evolve for decades? FORTRAN used to be the tool of choice for any work that involved crunching numbers. Then VisiCalc came along in the late 70s / early 80s building on good ideas that originated in the 60s and took (aside from macros) the programming work out of number crunching for most laypeople. Those who still needed more under-the-hood capability got tools like MATLab.

Software loaders / installers started as byte loaders and moved along to what we have today which is often specified using config style files that don't involve a lot of programming, but stand on the shoulders of general-purpose installers that programmers wrote.

The trend is to take routine things, generalize them, and create tools to provide those generalized capabilities to people who then don't have to write code. So the trend is toward codeless software.

However, there's always a leading edge to all of this; some next new thing that needs to be created, that often stands on top of all of the generalized automations that we no longer have to write, leaving us time to think about the new good ideas. We can pull together tremendous amounts of functionality as we build out containers, but we still need to commit some code. IFTTT is a great example of automations being built without writing software, but someone wrote IFTTT, exposing its generalized tool to the masses in a way that non-programmers could automate routine tasks.

Yes, there's a future for codeless software, and hopefully we're writing it. But there's also a future for code pushing the boundaries.


Dave

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Re^2: Is there a future for codeless software?
by perldigious (Priest) on Jun 03, 2019 at 15:14 UTC

    Of course! Haven't you seen Star Trek: TNG and how they program holodecks just by issuing vague verbal commands to future Siri? :-)

    Don't worry though, I believe that takes place beyond the year 2400, so plenty of job security for all current software engineers to finish out their careers.

    Just another Perl hooker - My clients appreciate that I keep my code clean but my comments dirty.

      From what we can see, the future Siri still phones home at the soonest opportunity to get the request parsed. The request is almost certainly then outsourced to a coding and art team from sometime in the early '90s (by sling-shotting a courier ship around a star to deliver the task details, obviously), and the results are incorporated into the install files for the ship's computer so it is available immediately upon the original request.

        Exactly, if everyone just properly utilized negative delay buffers such as this, even Microsoft couldn't slow computing down... actually, I take that back, they'd still somehow find a way. :-)

        Just another Perl hooker - My clients appreciate that I keep my code clean but my comments dirty.

      Haven't you seen Star Trek: TNG and how they program holodecks just by issuing vague verbal commands to future Siri?

      And five minutes after they do that, they always seems to need the whole crew fixing the resulting mess. Like, Holodeck characters taking control of the Enterprise... again.

      perl -e 'use Crypt::Digest::SHA256 qw[sha256_hex]; print substr(sha256_hex("the Answer To Life, The Universe And Everything"), 6, 2), "\n";'

        I hate to be the one to break this to you, but you're in a holodeck right now. Restarting the simulation in 5, 4, 3, 2 ...

Re^2: Is there a future for codeless software?
by karlgoethebier (Abbot) on Jun 08, 2019 at 20:35 UTC

    I really wonder if I want this: Automatically light the way for the pizza delivery guy. And i bet a sixpack that the software that makes my new car park automatically is handwoven 😎 Or i hope so.

    «The Crux of the Biscuit is the Apostrophe»

    perl -MCrypt::CBC -E 'say Crypt::CBC->new(-key=>'kgb',-cipher=>"Blowfish")->decrypt_hex($ENV{KARL});'Help

      And i bet a sixpack that the software that makes my new car park automatically is handwoven 😎 Or i hope so.

      Actually, it's quite possible - maybe even likely - a model of the car was put in a variety of virtual environments and an AI learned how to park it by trial and error in each scenario.

        "... it's quite possible..."

        Yes, sure. You are absolutely right. And probably the day will come that some AI figures out how to send you some beer over TCP/IP. To me this stuff is a little bit frightening. Remember the shock some brave pilots suffered when autothrottle and autopilot were introduced. Best regards, Karl

        «The Crux of the Biscuit is the Apostrophe»

        perl -MCrypt::CBC -E 'say Crypt::CBC->new(-key=>'kgb',-cipher=>"Blowfish")->decrypt_hex($ENV{KARL});'Help

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