How might such a world (of universal programming literacy) come about?
Most likely from a continuing trend to automate the way a lot of work gets done, and then people would learn programming as a way of engaging with that world.
For example, instead of spending half an hour in the supermarket or even 10 minutes browsing a supermarket site on the web, you might be able to compose an augmented shopping list on your phone.
6 Apples
4 bread rolls
Could become :
"Apples".
prefer("Pink Lady" or "Fuji").
take(6).
otherwise.take(4)
"Bread rolls".
only("Wholemeal").
take(4).
prefer("Top=Poppy Seed")
Deliver("Wednesday")
Order_from(
priorities("Waitrose","Asda","Sainsbury","Tesco")
)
Similar little languages can be developed for most activities. So I'd guess that we'll all be writing little scripts for robots or large automated services. There's an assumption that people must prefer navigating rather laborious graphical interfaces to get stuff done. But if they were more programming literate they may learn to use and love such small scripts instead.
Well, you already know but I still think wiki has a future, as pointed to by Smallest Federated Wiki. There are some flaws / issues with SFW, mainly I think because not enough people are working on it, but it’s still the signpost for how wiki could evolve.
Would still love to see you and other UseMod / OddMuse people look at ways to engage, even if you don’t switch over.
2012 is the year when it just became more and more clear that we need our own space and shouldn’t be dependent on Fb / Tw / G+ etc.
Fb / Tw / G+ offer two compelling things : 1) an aggregate river of stuff from people we care about, 2) really easy transclusion from various rich media sites.
We could have a distributed river architecture if we took RSS and some kind of pubsub architecture (eg. RssCloud) seriously. SFW has made transclusion protocols central to its philosophy. If we pick up on both, figure out how to get the most important things we get from the mainstream working smoothly, we can create a compelling alternative on our terms. And one of the interesting, overlooked, facts about G+ is that it showed that significant numbers of people are still willing to experiment with alternatives. As long as you can get a critical mass of around 20 people you care about to use it, G+ is as valuable as anything else. You don’t need 1 billion users. You aren’t trying to take over the world at this point, just to have a syndication / discussion architecture which isn’t owned by THEM.
Iterative, "test driven", development.
Break your idea down into a number of simple "stories", each of which describes a single chunk of activity which goes all the way through from the beginning to the end of a user's experience with the software. Importantly a story is not a traditional "component" ... but represents a complete, working but minimal slice through the functionality.
For example, a story could be "the user goes to our site at a URL and sees a page describing our idea" or, for a drawing program, "the user can create and save a jpg file" (even though that jpg file is just a blank canvas).
Once you have some stories, order them by importance. If you could only get one story working, what would be the most valuable? If you could only get two stories, which would those be?
Start on the most important story. As any particular story shouldn't be too complicated, you can probably figure out fairly intuitively the components you need in order to make it happen. (If you can't, you're trying to fit too much into a single story.) Those components might be functions, they might be objects which have several methods (if so, ONLY worry about the methods of the object which satisfy the current story, ignore any others), they might be HTML forms or templates.
Now write AUTOMATED TESTS for the components you need for this story. Unit tests for the functions and objects. Ideally something like Selenium for the web forms.
Write code to pass the tests in a test-driven style ... ie. write test, write code to pass test, refactor your code to eliminate redundancy, write next test etc. When one story is finished, start figuring out how to do the next most important and work on that.
Somewhere down your list of stories you have your minimum viable product: that is, the minimal thing which is worth releasing to your customers in order for them to give you feedback on whether this is useful to them. That is not necessarily just one story, it might be after the first three. Or the first ten. Whatever it is, once you hit it, release your product to the customers and start getting their reaction.
From now on you are in maintenance / iterative growth mode. You'll be taking the feedback from the customer to rewrite and reorder the stories. While continuing to implement them according to your best, most up-to-date, sense of priorities. You'll want to release new development to the customer as fast as reasonably possible so you can collect the feedback on your improvements too.
Don't assume that one story has to equal one release, because you'll be tempted to inflate your individual story to contain more than it should. But try to keep releases down to as few stories as possible so they can happen frequently : which maximizes both your information, and the customer's sense of progress.
The job was really to take C++, which was a fairly static language, and show people how to write dynamic programs in a static language. That's what most of the patterns in that book were about. And in the process, patterns extended the life of C++ by a decade, which is not what I thought would happen. What I thought would happen is people, when they learned these patterns, would look at them and say, "Wow, these patterns are hard in C++ and they're easy in Smalltalk. So if I want to think in terms of these patterns, I might as well use a language where they're easily expressed." And extend the life of Smalltalk by a decade. But the opposite happened.I always suspected that the patterns everyone got so excited about were basically a way of overcoming static typing. Ward confirms it :-)
These days, I'm thinking a lot about 3D printers, desktop manufacturing and software to create physical things.
Last year I did some art pieces using software to generate drawings for laser cutters and 3D printers, and I'm continuing along the same line. I want to move this stuff into the browser, and the combination of CoffeeScript and Raphael.js is turning out to be pretty good for this. (Did I mention I really, really like CoffeeScript?)
I also dabbled a bit with Prolog, wondering whether it can be used as a high-level description language for machines or other complex objects. The really interesting question is if you can use the built-in inference engine of Prolog to help with the design. (Aside, here's a silicon layout engine in Prolog) I haven't got very far with that yet, but I'm now considering how Prolog can be combined with or made to output OpenScad (or PyScad) code.
A couple of days ago Simon Wardley posted on his blog that he was searching for a SpimeScript :
So, I want to return to ... the formation of Spime Script. We're entering a phase where hardware will become increasingly as malleable as software which leads to a problem of choice - if I want to change the function of something, do I do this in software or hardware? The tendency today is obviously towards software because its more malleable but the future is never the past. However this creates a problem of skill - will I need to become proficient in both software and CAD / electronic design?
In reality both CAD and whatever software language you use, compile down to instruction sets and the function of the device is the interaction of these instruction sets - one which is substantiated physically and the other which is substantiated digitally.
Turning this on its head then why not write the function of what you want, the function of the device? Compilers can therefore undertake the complex decision trees (which is what they're good at) required to determine what element of that function is encoded as physical and what element is digital.
A future language is needed, something whereby the output is both physical and digital and I describe merely the function of what I'm after.
That's a really exciting vision.
Now, here's what I think is really important for a SpimeScript.
It should learn from HTML / CSS.
While HTML / CSS is a pain in many ways, there's a very interesting insight in it about design. That design comes in layers. It's partly about the separation of logical structure and visual style. It's partly about the cumulative effect of the Cascade in Cascading Style Sheets. It's partly about the fact that the browser has reasonable defaults for the geometric properties of logical structure. (Today, those defaults look rather out-of-date but there would be little to stop a browser manufacturer making their defaults look more like Readability or Twitter Bootstrap.)
So here's the main feature request for a SpimeScript. It should be possible to define the logical structure of, say, a machine and have some layout-engine give it plausible default geometric properties. But it should also be possible for designers to layer optional design hints on top of that layout in the form of extra constraints and have the engine deal with fitting them together.
As with the silicon design case, there must be some prior art here, but I'm not quite sure where it is. Electronic Design Automation maybe.
Surely all practical knowledge is anecdotal and, therefore, an unwarranted step from the particular to the universal. All advice in this “genre” (Tom Peters, Charles Handy, Seth Godin etc. etc. etc. ) comes with an implicit health warning. And anyone with any experience of the world will apply salt as a matter of course.
Should we hold that against Ries in particular?
So his models come from the software industry. OK. But someone else’s advice will come from banking, or food retail or oil or the military. Each with some parallels to your business but each with its own idiosyncrasies as well.
One thing you can say in favour of Ries’s bias is that more and more things are getting automated and so more and more of our world “is made of software”. Software processes are replacing other kinds of process that were embodied in administrative or managerial practices or hardwired into physical machines. In this world, improvements in software are often more effective than improvements in other areas.
You’re a coder yourself. You probably know your Mythical Man Month etc. You know perfectly well that software doesn’t benefit from heavy bureaucratic management. But that exciting and effective software usually does come from small, enthusiastic, “agile” teams.
So, if software is becoming an increasingly important factor in business. And software thrives under agile conditions, it would follow that business in general will probably benefit from agile.
Disclosure : I’m a software guy myself, so I’m totally down with the land-grab programme.
One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old UNIX command that hasn't yet been implemented on the web, and fix that. talk and finger became ICQ, LISTSERV became Yahoo! Groups, ls became (the original) Yahoo!, find and grep became Google, rn became Bloglines, pine became Gmail, mount is becoming S3, and bash is becoming Yahoo! Pipes. I didn't get until tonight that Twitter is wall for the web. I love that.Marc Hedlund via Coding Horror
What "templating" means to most people is a way of having the developer write out HTML basically the way that you would send it to the browser and then having a way to include a few things -- typically variable substitution by using special tags lik <% ... %> or similar.
In our case, no one writes any code that looks like HTML/XML literals, so there's nothing in our codebase that really matches what most people think of as templates. We do have view code but that interleaves calls into the model and application logic along with a Python code description of what the HTML for that component should be, which is different from templates which are usually based around the ideas of separating logic and data fetching from this.
# HTML library
# basic level
def tag(name,x,*argv) :
if x is None :
return u"<"+name+u"/>"
if argv != (None,) :
inside = u''.join(argv)
else :
inside = u''
if isinstance(x,dict) :
# we're passing a dictionary of attributes for the tag
s = u"<%s " % name
s = s + ' '.join(['%s="%s"'%(k,v) for (k,v) in x.iteritems()])
s = s + u">"+inside+u"</"+name+u">"
return s
# or there are no attributes, just inner
return u"<"+name+u">"+x+inside+u"</"+name+u">"
# Now we'll actually make some tags
tags = ['html','head','body','script','p','div','table',
'tr','th','td','ul','ol','li','dt','dd','h1','h2',
'h3','h4','h5','h6', 'style','pre']
loc = locals()
def setit(loc,t) :
loc[t] = lambda x=None,*argv : tag(t,x,*argv)
for t in tags :
setit(loc,t)
# Use like this
html(
head(),
body(
h2("Header"),
p('para1'),
p('para2')
)
)
What I take away from these stories is that pushing out ugly prototypes of your products will not prevent you from building a world-class engineering organization in the future.
