The Future of Programming (2013)

by illo • 9 years ago

225 66 9 years ago

macintux• 9 years ago

One of my all-time favorite talks. The IT industry is pretty bad in general at knowing what problems have previously been solved.

romaniv• 9 years ago

Yeah. Almost every time I watch a Marvin Minsky or Alan Kay video of any kind I'm surprised with info on some awesome technology or research from the 60s or 70s.

pjmlp3• 9 years ago

You should also check the systems programming research that was happening on those days, NEWP already had UNSAFE blocks that required "root" blessing to be executed.

Or the IBM RISC research using PL/8.

And many other examples, lost in research papers from all those companies.

skadamat• 9 years ago

I think you'll like the discussion he had at CMU a few years back, which focused a lot on the technology side of things https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFc379hu--8

pjmlp3• 9 years ago

Also for me.

When I delve into the digitized copies of these researches, I am always fascinated by the little treasures I find out.

And by being old enough to have experimented with some of them it saddens me the amount of left turns we have taken, for some to still be happy with a plain phosphor terminal experience.

robbrit• 9 years ago

In many cases, we have to first acknowledge that the problem exists before we attempt to apply some of these solutions. I've noticed myself seeing solutions to problems that I didn't know I had, only to brush off the solution as though it were only an interesting curiosity with no real practical use. It was years later when I went back to that and realized how useful it could have been.

fhood• 9 years ago

This was one of my professors favorite gripes. He loved to tell stories about how companies would reinvent algorithms (usually multiple times) that had been published in the 70's and 80's

zvrba• 9 years ago

The problem here is search. The problem may have been solved, but finding the relevant paper is like looking for a needle in the haystack. It doesn't help that terminology has changed during the years...

BjoernKW• 9 years ago

Apart from making information easily retrievable, which ironically academia at least used to be notoriously bad at, inventing an algorithm and using it effectively in an application in many cases are two very different matters.

These arguments often get handwavy rather quickly. Real-life applications have to accommodate edge cases and non-functional requirements, something a scientific paper doesn't need to account for.

That's perfectly fine. It isn't a scientist's job to worry about implementation details but those shouldn't be brushed off lightly either.

shalabhc7• 9 years ago

what problems have previously been solved

And we're worse at identifying what the problems actually are.

pierre_d528• 9 years ago

Treasures from Alan Kay and friends can be found here: http://www.vpri.org

Do check the STEPS project: a complete system in 10_000 readable LOC.

Really exceptional.

Bret Victor can be found here: http://worrydream.com

Friends can be found here: https://harc.ycr.org/member/

Make sure to check Alan Kay's answers on Quora: https://www.quora.com/profile/Alan-Kay-11

melling• 9 years ago

We’re still trying to crawl out of the tar pit.

https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master...

bluetwo• 9 years ago

Was it just me or did the talk not actually cover "The Future of Programming"?

miguelrochefort2• 9 years ago

It covered the future of programming from the point of view of the past.

platz• 9 years ago

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DaysOfFuturePast

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrofuturism

Jazcash• 9 years ago

woosh

mrspeaker• 9 years ago

It was about "the future of programming" as it should have (or could have) been, as seen from the 70s.

"These are some good ideas. It would be kind of a shame if in 40 years [ie, today] we're still coding in procedures in text files in a sequential programming model. That would suggest we didn't learn anything from this really fertile period of computer science [...] The real tragedy would be if people forgot you could have new ideas about programming models in the first place."

"Once you grow up with dogma, it's really hard to break out of it".

miguelrochefort2• 9 years ago

Is anyone working on these problems, or did people just give up?

It's crazy to think that the way we create and consume software barely changed since the 60s/70s.

pishpash• 9 years ago

Commercialization and commoditization: "Why make things better when people don't care?"

continuational• 9 years ago

Oh, people do care. Programmers are expensive, and making them more productive means more money for the bottom line.

It’s just that we don’t know how. Even designing a good text based language is very challenging, and in no way a solved problem. Something graphical and interactive has a much larger design surface, and is thus even harder to get right, especially for general purpose programming.

brudgers• 9 years ago

We consume software very differently, because the we includes people like us...by which I mean that statistically to many decimal places nobody had access to software in the 1960's and in the 1970's the people who had access to software were all out in the long tail of standard deviations of a Bell Curve.

In terms of creating software, in the 1960's most was being written in Assembly and if it was written in a higher level language that language almost certainly contained a large proportion of vendor specific instructions or was entirely proprietary or machine specific. That didn't change much in the 1970's and it was only at the end of the 1980's that language standards could practically mean portable code across vendors and platforms.

pjmlp3• 9 years ago

Some of it even got worse.

Outside AT&T walls, strong type systems programming did actually exist.

And here are we now still looking towards to somehow fix it, and it will take several generations.

kareemamin3• 9 years ago

Yeah it's definitely crazy! A few people are working on this from different angles. There is research https://harc.ycr.org/project/realtalk/, side projects that explore Jupyter notebook like programming environments: https://www.maria.cloud/intro, or https://www.runkit.com; my team and I are working on https://www.clay.run: making it easier to prototype by allowing developers to write code that is instantly running without setup or configuration and 'fork' other people's code to have your own running copy.

shalabhc7• 9 years ago

Maria, clay and runkit look interesting - I like the quick iterations and incremental programming they allow.

But you're still writing 'text' to manipulate 'data'. An example of something fundamentally different would be if you can make programs without text. I intentionally said make not write to avoid framing the discussion. For instance why write `(circle 10)` when you can instead just draw a circle and then perhaps define processes to manipulate it? I don't mean code generation - why even have text as the canonical form that describes computation processes?

david9272• 9 years ago

You're right, it is crazy. A few people, here and there, are trying -- but precious few.

There's a regular meetup group in San Francisco:

https://www.meetup.com/Future-of-Programming

andosteinmetz• 9 years ago

Max/MSP has implemented some of the visual programming ideas he refers to in the talk https://cycling74.com/products/max

It is domain-specific and their current promotional material makes it look like an expanded DAW a la Ableton Live, but you can develop all kinds of software in Max, not that you necessarily should.

tluyben2• 9 years ago

Check here;

https://2017.splashcon.org/track/live-2017#Call-for-Papers

Jonathan Edwards submitted something I like and HARC (checking out Sean his submission now), MS Research are doing cool things.

I wanted to go there. Next time perhaps; interesting work anyway.

shalabhc7• 9 years ago

Bret Victor is now at HARC (https://harc.ycr.org/member/) which has an interesting list of projects.

symstym2• 9 years ago

I think this attitude of "we solved these problems decades ago!" is rather naive and sometimes arrogant.

I think it's a fantastic talk, and that Bret Victor and Alan Kay are geniuses. But I feel that they both promote the idea that we definitively solved all these important computing problems years ago, and that people are just too clueless/resistant to catch on. Yes, I agree that many good ideas have been culturally "forgotten". But for the most part, the reason these great past ideas are not in use is because nobody has made them into a compelling product.

Their attitude is comparable to someone saying "oh I invented the WWW in 1985 but nobody would listen to me", or "oh I invented Twitter before Twitter but users weren't enlightened enough to appreciate it". Almost all good ideas were already had before, but they are worth comparatively little, and unlikely to catch on, until they are reified into something that people want to use.

I agree with them that probably more people should be working in certain areas (e.g. new ways of programming). But if they really had it all figured out, then why haven't they themselves made the amazing new programming language that we all use? What if it's the case that some of their ideas are good in theory, but are hard to translate into a usable product? Most people accept that execution>>idea in the world of startups, but don't acknowledge that the same may apply here.

Chris2048• 9 years ago

comparable to someone saying "oh I invented the WWW in 1985 but nobody would listen to me"

I hear there's a guy that invented EMAIL..

shalabhc7• 9 years ago

But for the most part, the reason these great past ideas are not in use is because nobody has made them into a compelling product.

I think you're overestimating the market's ability to select good ideas and specifically, promote long term scientific advances. A lot of variables affect what succeeds, e.g. marketing, coincidence, network effects etc.

You cannot leave everything to the market (i.e. what people adopt) and expect great science to come from it. Many times, great science (and maths) comes from the compelling drive of people to discover and create something new. These talks are encouraging that kind of research, and I don't see them saying they 'have it figured out', but rather pointing out ideas they think should be explored more extensively.

symstym2• 9 years ago

I certainly don't think that the market selects good ideas or is sufficient to promote long-term advances. Per the bit of my comment that you quoted, I'm saying that the reason that the ideas are not in use (more) is that they haven't been incorporated into more compelling products. He feels that good ideas are not in wide use because we didn't "get" them or forgot them. I'm saying that sure, that may be part of the reason, but I think most of the reason is that certain ideas that seem good on paper are really hard to put into practice.

Quoting the talk:

But I do think that it would be kind of a shame if in forty years we’re still coding in procedures and text files in a sequential programing model. I think that would suggest we didn’t learn anything from this really fertile period in computer science. So that would kind of be a tragedy.

Lots of people seem aware of the idea of coding without text files. There are some "visual" programming environments with traction (in the game dev world, Max/MSP). I'm even working on one myself! But there are significant downsides/challenges associated with this approach (more difficult to version control, often tied to one editor, etc.). So to his quote, the fact that we're still coding in text files may not be because we didn't learn anything, but because the idea of non-textual programming is hard to form into a product that more people want to use.

I agree with you that his talk is very valuable in terms of drawing attention to ideas that deserve more exploration, and I love the talk. It's just this one facet that I take issue with, the suggestion that the ideas haven't caught on because nobody appreciates them. His talks are frequently at the top of HN, they are widely appreciated. People have been super excited about related projects, like Light Table and Eve, and yet they haven't gotten much traction. So I think it's worth acknowledging that the problem is less idea-awareness and more compelling-implementation-difficulty.

taeric• 9 years ago

Agreed. I fall into this trap more often than I'd care to admit. But I've comforted myself into thinking this is not limited to our field. Look at folks convinced that Romans knew how to make better concrete. Or that Damascus steel is somehow beyond current capabilities.

Are there gems that were lost in the past? Almost certainly. Could we have done better by not getting obsessed with constantly rewriting things into new languages? Debatable. My money is on not. And I hate js.

usefulcat• 9 years ago

Timing can also play a huge role in the success of an invention or the widespread adoption of an idea.

davesque• 9 years ago

If you're saying you think the talk was arrogant, I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. I just found it funny. I thought the whole format of posing as a computer engineer in the early seventies seemed clever. Parts of the talk were a bit snarky, but not Linus-Torvalds-snarky.

sbov• 9 years ago

Some of the "better programming" stuff exists, programmers just don't program them because you don't need them for it.

Parallel programming didn't matter as much as long as clockrates continued to scale with transistor count. The disconnect is a relatively recent phenomena (last 10 years). There's also lots of tools beyond raw threads+locks these days.

pknerd2• 9 years ago

Using slide projector in 2013. Daring.

hacym• 9 years ago

I am pretty sure that was a conscious decision based on the subject matter.

evv• 9 years ago

No kidding! My favorite moment is at the beginning when he introduces the talk, then pushes the slide up to reveal the date :-D

pknerd2• 9 years ago

I was not trolling rather appreciating that he did not go with the flow.

kowdermeister• 9 years ago

That was part of his delivery. He presented like in the 70's to make a point. Even his design is retro.

fasquoika2• 9 years ago

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 granted.

"Do you know why these ideas, and so many other good ideas came about in this particular time period, the 60's-early 70's? Why did it all happen then? It's because it was late enough that technology kinda got to the point where you could actually kinda do things with computers, but it was still early enough that nobody knew what programming was. Nobody knew what programming was supposed to be. And they knew they didn't know, so they tried everything."

david9272• 9 years ago

This talk is not saying that these problems were "solved" decades ago but rather, decades ago we had much better instincts and in many ways we were on the right track, and now we're not.

fasquoika2• 9 years ago

Except that the track we're on now was started then. Unix was created during the time period he's talking about. We've just stopped looking at the other stuff. They weren't "on the right track", they didn't have a track. That's the point: they were doing everything

krmboya• 9 years ago

I've been looking into the linked resources more and more of late and they reveal a perspective of computing research I find I'm really excited about.

I wonder how one can start studying and taking part in this direction of computing research.

clusmore• 9 years ago

Slightly off-topic but does anybody know of other great talks with a quirky theme like this, where the talk is "set" in the 70s talking about the "future" (present)?

I'll kick it off by submitting [Growing a Language] (https://youtu.be/_ahvzDzKdB0) by Guy Steele, where he speaks using only monosyllabic words and words he defines in terms of other monosyllabic (or previously defined) words.

spiralganglion• 9 years ago

There's the Gary Bernhardt classic "The Birth & Death of Javascript"

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

CyberDildonics• 9 years ago

There is a huge disconnect between these flashy ideas and what you can actually use to create software. Showing cool ideas is great, but there needs to be interfaces that scale to complex software and a realistic way to integrate them with languages that already exist. Brand new languages with no eco system and without mature compilers backing them are not going to allow general software to be written in them.

manodocedoceu• 9 years ago

Finding new semantics for constructing computational logic is certainly a good middle-of-the-road innovation.

The philisophical underpinnings of my own research and practice over the past decade are in constant existential friction with many of the most basic assumptions that underlie information theory. I've argued about it on here before. Since I'm terrified of general AI developing under the current power-dynamic, I haven't been too enthusiastic about contributing.

That said, a lot needs to be disbelieved-- we need an ideological grass fire on the great plans, of sorts-- before certain types of phenomenon can be reliably conjured through our electrical counting machines.

We've mistaken the representation with the thing itself, especially in the 'information sciences.' The idea of 'information' and 'data' as 'packets' presupposes the existence of a physical world composed of neatly delineated objects. While this has been and continues to be a convenient and even useful approximation of reality, it is still that-- a representation.

I've never seen this assumption questioned Im CS/IS forums. At this point, it's beyond dogma.

The unbelievable volume and density of the knowledge built in the information sciences, all of it sewn into these base assumptions of information theory, generate in the unwitting practitioner a belief considered as a hard-as-bedrock fact, always presumed but never questioned. It's confirmation bias propping up a simulacra of reality.

Like physics did last century, our latest IS works (like general AI) are hitting the hard limit on these assumptions.

What's next? Try deconstructing it yourself. That's part of the fun, and helpful in the creative process.

In the mean time It would be nice to see new ways of visualizing code and code execution, that's probably a good start.

Code in Motion – An Interstellar Inspired Visualization for the JVM - https://vimeo.com/96317948 Code Galaxies Visualization - http://anvaka.github.io/pm/ Binary data visualization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15164166

aws_ls• 9 years ago

Call me naive, but I listened the entire talk thinking it happened in 1973. Then came back and after seeing the discussion realized its an act.

So definitely my wonderment and awe of it came down by several notches, as I could see how every 1/2 minutes I was exclaiming in wonder of how relevant it was to today's time. But of course when you recreate the past in the future, you can be very selective towards ideas/topics which are relevant in some way.

The Future of Programming (2013)

Related Stories