It's hard to write code for computers, but it's harder to write code for humans

Re:It's hard to write code for computers, but it's harder to... by animal531 on Friday September 27, 2024 @11:16AM (#41671521)

Yeah I've also been playing with ChatGPT etc. and sometimes they can produce great code, or at least get you up to speed a lot faster. As long as you ask them questions about well known problems they're great, but break down after that. But they're definitely going to play more and more of a role going forward.

What I really want to explore (and where I think there might be some big room for improvement) are around how we represent and visualize both code and data, as well as how we interact with it. Full visual programming has often been tried before and while it works fine for a while it begins to break down once projects become more complicated.

I instead want to explore some alternate text based options where we use the visual aspect as an assistant, whether by grouping or collating blocks that we're working on, changes that needs to be made and so forth.

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Re:It's hard to write code for computers, but it's harder to... by ants_everywhere on Friday September 27, 2024 @11:31AM (#41671734)

I'm mildly skeptical of visual programming because code generally won't be a planar graph and it's rarely useful to visualize a complicated enough graph. You can try to embed the graph in hyperbolic space, but I'm not sure how much you get out of it. For example of visualizing a graph where it's not clear what's going on: https://cambridge-intelligence.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/0...

Coding is a logic/language type activity that uses the language parts of your brain. Visualization can help see that certain relationships are true (e.g. visualizing the graph of a function), but I think the fundamental bottleneck we're dealing with here the inadequacies of the visual regions of the brain to do logic, not a lack of AI tooling.

I'd be happy to have my mind changed though.

EDIT: Although, an AI version of something like Chernoff Faces for visualizing data would be cool.

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