logoalt Hacker News

skydhash • yesterday at 8:40 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

>> Writing code is solved

This always reads like “writing english is solved” just because you collected snippets of famous works and have built a spell corrector.

Code is written to process data. The struggle was never to learn programming syntax (most grammar are only a few page long). The main struggle was that it’s hard to model a domain into an information system, identifying the components and their relationships, what is ingested, and what needs to be output.

Computers have integers and floats, but you need to implement units like distance, money, various counts,… The real world have words and sentences, but that needs encoding like ascii and unicode as well as the “string” concepts to make it work. Take HN, I’d bet that if you can model it in terms of data, writing code is not an issue.


Replies

needfish • today at 1:16 AM

Thank you, this is what I've been seeing. Structs and objects are easy, but the hard part is encoding the domain most accurately into given data types of the computer (or creating new data structures to solve the problem!)

If anything, I do expect the casual non-tech users to be making the most adaptable software because they have what they want in their head. Although, part of what the dev does is figuring out the weeds, and only a part of users have the patience to sit through detail corrections. And the AI user has to verbalize their wants exactly too.

➕ show 1 reply
chasd00 • yesterday at 11:18 PM

> The struggle was never to learn programming syntax

For 85-90% of devs, yes this was the struggle. Creating and updating rows in a database from user input is all the “domain modeling” there is in most software. That’s what is solved by AI and it’s the majority of software dev.

➕ show 2 replies