Which means that no code is either use case bounded or claiming something roughly on par with a break through. The first is common enough and where I imagine most low/no code offerings fall when the hype is stripped away. The hype seems to promise something on par with the second and I think that's where the dismissive attitude comes from.
An extreme example of this are logic and verification systems like prolog and TLA+.
There is a sweet spot of low code I haven't seen explored yet, which is a declarative system that is not Turing complete. That would be an interesting avenue to explore.
So I guess I still see declarative languages as being part of the tech stack and something tantamount to AI being needed to handle all the "do what I mean" that accompanies business process documentation.
It could be done directly if every BA had enough programming knowledge to put together schemas and run CLI tools to verify them.
That's quite a lot of programming knowledge. It makes some sense to decouple the business-oriented from the more technical roles - BA's trying their hand at coding is how you get mammoth Excel spreadsheets and other big-balls-of-mud.
As for formal methods, oh, where shall I even begin? The amount of time to turn something intuitive into correct predicate logic can be prohibitive to most of professionals. HN used to feature Eric Hehner's Practical Theory of Programming. I actually read through his book. I could well spend hours specifying a searching condition even though I could solve the search problem in a few minutes. And have you checked out the model checking patterns (http://people.cs.ksu.edu/~dwyer/spec-patterns.ORIGINAL)? I honestly don't know how a mere mortal like me could spend my best days figuring how to correctly specify something as simple as an event will eventually have between an event Q and an event P. Just for fun, the CTL specification is as follows:
``` G(Q -> !E[!R U (!P & !R & EX(P & E[!R U (!P & !R & EX(P & E[!R U (!P & !R & EX(P & !R & EF(R)))]))]))]) ```
As I said, formally specifying a system, no matter what tools one uses, is essential complexity.
That definitely needs a citation. The Wikipedia page mentions no such motivation, and describes Alchemy as a proto-scientific endeavor aimed at understanding the natural world.
If you went back in time to an age where people were working hard on changing lead into gold and your mission was to help them succeed as soon as possible, your best bet would probably be something like teaching them the decimal place value system, or how to express algebraic problems as geometric ones. But if you also told people that this knowledge was the key to solving the two problems they were working on, "how to make very pure versions of a substance", and "how to understand what makes specific types of matter different" you would reasonably have been regarded as deluded.
I don’t see how that follows. It’s just a truism that nobody figured out how to do it until someone finally did. The fact that the path wasn’t obvious at various points in the past seems irrelevant.
> But if you also told people that this knowledge was the key to solving the two problems they were working on, "how to make very pure versions of a substance", and "how to understand what makes specific types of matter different" you would reasonably have been regarded as deluded.
If they were listening to you at all, it’s not at all obvious why this part would sound deluded.
How is it any more exotic than any of the failed alchemies?
As far as I can see they were all quite abstract.
This one that happens to be correct, no less so.
The point is that 'just keep trying' would not have been a good strategy.
Yes, it’s possible that there are some concepts we have yet to think of.
See: https://numinous.productions/ttft/
The explanation of how hard it would be to come up with Arabic numerals if you didn’t already have them covers this.
However the point here is that we can learn from this, and we now know a lot more about how to do hard things.
‘It’s too hard and we should give up’ (the countervailing straw man) is even less supported by history than ‘keep trying’.
It just requires a particle accelerator and the amounts are so tiny that it’s ridiculously expensive. But hey, we can still do it!
Many alchemists tried to turn copper to gold as well. They might as well think that their predecessors are just unlucky by using the wrong implementation.
Imagine how many tried flying before we "invented flight", and how many said "oh how they won't learn from the past".