I liked this article. I particularly liked the way the author attacked the problem by clearing his notions of what programming is and attempting to come at it from a new angle. I'll be interested to see what his group comes up with.
That said, I think that fundamentally the problem isn't with programming, it's with US. :) Human beings are imprecise, easily confused by complexity, unable to keep more than a couple of things in mind at a time, can't think well in dimensions beyond 3 (if that), unable to work easily with abstractions, etc. Yet we're giving instructions to computers which are (in their own way) many orders of magnitude better at those tasks.
Short of AI that's able to contextually understand what we're telling them to do, my intuition is that the situation is only going to improve incrementally.
I agree. I beleive that most of the incidental complexity has to do with the fact that in end, every single thing greater than a single bit in the digital realm is a convention.
A byte is a convention over bits.
An instruction is a convention over bytes.
A programming language is a convention over instructions.
It turns out that every time someone sets out to solve a problem with programming, they create their own convention.
It just so happens that either there is no convetion over how to create covnentions, or it is just not followed and thus creates a paralel convention.
We cannot get our arbitrary conventions in line with each other, unless we plan in advance.
Considering, its amazing how far we have come in the middle of this chaos of unrestrained creation.
That said, I think that fundamentally the problem isn't with programming, it's with US. :) Human beings are imprecise, easily confused by complexity, unable to keep more than a couple of things in mind at a time, can't think well in dimensions beyond 3 (if that), unable to work easily with abstractions, etc. Yet we're giving instructions to computers which are (in their own way) many orders of magnitude better at those tasks.
Short of AI that's able to contextually understand what we're telling them to do, my intuition is that the situation is only going to improve incrementally.