Response to The Future of Programming:
I personally don't see this getting very far. They advertise programming from the browser and therefore being able to program on any device that can run a browser, or more specifically, Chrome. Sure, programming on Chromebooks might be useful, but there's no real difference to doing that compared to programming on any other conventional laptop. The other possibility that they say opens up is that you'd be able to program on your iPad! Are you kidding? I can't think of anything worse than trying to write a program on any sort of touchscreen device - unless - we're talking about drag and drop snippets of code to create a larger program, Which is what I think is the real future of programming. Before I talk about that, I want to finish with Cloud9, though. One of their other main selling points is that you can "zoom" in and out of your code to have a better idea of where you are within it. This is pretty cool, but it isn't novel by any means. It is probably something that will be a standard of any future IDE's that come out. Ian showed me the Sublime text editor, which I have fallen in love with this semester. It more or less does the same thing. Another selling point of Cloud9 would be to access your code anywhere online, but again, this isn't a very novel technology, nor does it really meet any new needs. Over the semester, we've learned how to use version control repository programs, such as Subversion, and Git. These programs, in my opinion, provide the same services that Cloud9 does and more. Not only can you save your code online, and re-download it from any other machine (although perhaps not as easily), but you can also revert to older versions of the code if you accidentally broke something, then committed it to the repository. In the end, Cloud9 to me is mainly just a kind of over-the-top showcase of what an IDE should be. It looks pretty, but doesn't provide any new functionality that previous IDEs haven't before.
Now, where I think the real future of programming is headed is graphical programming interfaces. Much like how developing websites has become nowadays compared to when the world wide web still had its baby teeth. Before, you had to know HTML and even then, you had to spend a lot of time and effort to make a website that looked more than pathetic. Nowadays, you click on a theme, and boom, it formats your entire page for you. Adding pictures and tables? No problem, just click here. Don't like it over there? No problem, just drag it over here. The most comparable thing that is in use today that I can envision the future of programming to be like, is developing apps for Android. The Android SDK implements drag-and-drop programming with certain elements, such as radio buttons, check-boxes, and lists. All you have to do is click which type you want to insert and its done, no writing Java code necessary. The other thing that leads me to believe that this is the future of programming is how much more abstracted our languages have gotten. If you think about the progression throughout the decades it makes a lot of sense. Machine language deals with literal machine hardware instructions, with C, you can directly access memory elements at a specified location, then you move to Python or other similar languages, where you can dynamically specify the type of a variable, it is no longer static. It won't be long before languages are abstracted further to be able to accept "ideas" of how the program should work as the input, and the environment or language will translate it further for you as necessary. It's only a small step from this to graphical programming, in my opinion.
No comments:
Post a Comment