Autocoding evolves from........

[Martijn Faassen]

Chris Gonnerman <chris.gonnerman at newcenturycomputers.net> wrote:
[snip]
> Ah, perhaps you are right.  I was in a particularly bad mood at that point.

> How the heck to you "enjoy" an idiot like Rue though?

I'm just weird like that. It's like a voyage of exploration to see
strange things. Or like an interest in alien life forms. Or human beings
for that matter. I am interested in the occasional unusual personality.

I was not suggesting we all enjoy him or something. We all should just
go our merry way. Besides, you're just responding to him like that as
you're a pseudo-programmer feeling threatened by his superior auto-coding
technology! I mean, it's all obvious that everybody arguing with him on
it is just running scared. Rue's brilliant psychological insight in the matter
gave me one of those zen moments. :)

Anyway, I agree with people that I haven't made a lot of sense out of 
his auto-coding proposals yet. On the surface the desire is simple; 
being able to write more complicated software without doing so much 
detailed work. Using a computer for it, instead! That's really what most
good programmers do; climb up onto ever higher levels of abstractions (in
any direction that seems 'up') to make problems easier and quicker to solve.

Presumably we'll keep on climbing. Where Rue loses me is in that he 
says he has a general solution to this that can do it all automatically.
Of course theoretically we could construct a human-scale AI that can do it,
but until then...writing software is a human activity, requiring a large
range of human knowledge. I don't see a computer do that just yet, though
of course software (languages, libraries and other things) is likely to 
continue to become increasingly helpful.

Of course Rue might likely pop in and say I'm all wrong. I'd enjoy that,
so far he doesn't seem to have responded to me yet. Probably doesn't know
what to make of me.. :)

Regards,

Martijn
-- 
History of the 20th Century: WW1, WW2, WW3?
No, WWW -- Could we be going in the right direction?