memes

All programming languages claim to be for humans. Doesn't make them good at it.

Counterexample.

i don't think brainfuck or ook are actually meant for humans. more like against humans

...there are languages that aren't written in plaintext???

I've kinda noticed this block when working with non-developers attempting low-code and no-code platforms. Anecdotally, non-coders tend to assume that knowing how to code is the hard part of software development. It's really not though, there's tons of resources to learn any language you want for free, and cs students cover all of the basics in their first year. The actually hard part (well one of them) is knowing what to code: the data structures and algorithms. Pro_code, low-code, or no-code, there's just no way around not knowing how to design a working, efficient algorithm or a clean, scalable database schema. Ironically, for anything but the most trivial problems, the lack of maturity in low-code platforms tends to only make the algorithm harder to implement.

Though perhaps when AIs start actually coding, they're all going to just probably use the native instructions. Because why not?

Text code is overwhelming

Text is overwhelming (for me)

I like spaced out, low density information. I can process it better.

I only code in binary-encoded programming languages.

A lot of people really have difficulty with maths and programming.

The way i imagine it, programming is something non-real, something metaphysical, or how you want to call it. And a lot of people even plainly reject that such a thing meaningfully exists. Think about how many people reject the existence of "spirits", "demons", or "god", based on nothing else but the argument that it is not tangible. Something similar is going on with maths and programming.

I think it's "learned helplessness", sadly. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

Like much of math, people are often eager to talk about the cool stuff and make it sound hard because they are proud they understood it. For a newcomer, this is just a brick in the face.

It took me looking at unfamiliar programming languages and realizing that I could read most of them without really knowing them for me to realize I probably could learn to at least read another language.

It's been years since then and I'm still probably shit at Spanish, but just like programming languages regular languages were made by humans to communicate with other humans, you're capable of understanding any of them given a reasonable amount of time and guidance.

What is non-plain-tezxt code?

Maybe I'm an old fogey, but I usually hear more pushback against visual languages as being too finicky to actually create anything with and I usually advocate for a blending of them, like working in Godot and having nodes to organize behaviour but written scripts to implement it.

I really appreciate the talks from Bret Victor, like Inventing on Principle (https://youtu.be/PUv66718DII), where he makes some great points about what sorts of things our tooling, in addition to the language, could do to offload some of the cognitive load while coding. I think it's a great direction to be thinking, where it's feasible anyways.

Also, one reason folks new to programming at least struggle with text code is that they don't have the patterns built up. When you're experienced and look at a block of code, you usually don't see each keyword, you see the concept. You see a list comprehension in Python and instantly go "Oh it's a filter", or you see a nested loop and go "Oh it's doing a row/column traversal of a 2d matrix". A newbie just sees symbols and keywords and pieces each one together individually.

Programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute

We're in x86 and we speak binary assembly in this architecture, goddammit.