Category: tech

Think back to the mobile phone you had in 2010. It could access the internet, but it wasn’t such a great experience. On average, people only spent 20% of their time online on their phones back then, according to Zenith, a media agency. Today, by contrast, we spend around 70% of our time on the internet on phones, based on estimates and forecasts for more than 50 countries covering two-thirds of the world’s population. By 2019, Zenith says this will rise to close to 80%. What used to be called “mobile internet” is now just the internet.

A small group of programmers wants to change how people code—before catastrophe strikes. — from the Atlantic Magazine

• Basic Premise: Code is getting too complicated–how to make it work better for humans?
• Example: Problem with 911 calls going out due to simple counter bug
• Software is “eating the world” but unexpected complications create havoc
• Engineering is 1950s state of thinking: simple failures.
• Problem with code is that the complexity is invisible.
• Example of hackers remotely taking over a self-driving car.
• John Resig, creator of javascript, tech lead at Khan Academy, wondered why learning programming is so tough. He watched a talk by Bret Victor in Montreal in 2012, (Inventing on Principle), about how programming is broken, and how to fix it.
• Khan Academy has become perhaps the largest computer-programming class in the world, with a million students, on average, actively using the program each month.
• Bret wants to work with images instead of abstract text.
• Programming should be visual like WYSIWYG programs.

Example Pic:

• Airplane engineering has dealt with complexity by writing SCADE product family (for safety-critical application development environment)
• Think: MDE (model driven engineering), so you write logical templates, not hand-written code.
• Documentation is another area where what people want can differ from the code that gets created.
• “Architects draw detailed plans before a brick is laid or a nail is hammered,” he wrote in an article. “But few programmers write even a rough sketch of what their programs will do before they start coding.”
• Programmers tend to be pragmatic and distrust the theoretical, ivory-tower stuff, which also works against programming improvements.