• Aqarius@lemmy.world
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          10 days ago

          It’s by design very verbose and “English”-like, like instead of x=y*z it would go “MULTIPLY y BY z GIVING x”, the idea was that it would read almost like natural language, so that non-tech staff could understand it.

    • SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      It’s very common. Every few years there is some no-code platform claiming no developers are needed anymore in any sector, not just web dev. Invariably these only work if you stay on the narrow path and of course the customer asks something outside of the easy path after the first demo so a lot of work by devs are needed to make of happen.

      AI is just one more like that, but with hype on steroids.

      • esa@discuss.tchncs.de
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        10 days ago

        And very old. Part of the sales pitch for the COmmon Business-Protected Language was that anyone could learn to code in almost plain English.

        Also, the stuff they wind up making is the kind of stuff that people with no coding experience make. Cooking up an ugly website with terrible performance and security isn’t much harder than making an ugly presentation with lots of WordArt. But it never was, either.

        Between COBOL and LLM-enhanced “low code” we had other stuff, like that infamous product from MS that produced terrible HTML. At this point I can’t even recall what it was called. The SharePoint editor maybe?

        • SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world
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          10 days ago

          Even SQL was originally called SEQUEL, Structured English QUEry Language. They got sued for the name and changed it to SQL. It was also pitched to retrieve data with plain language.

        • xthexder@l.sw0.com
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          10 days ago

          the kind of stuff that people with no coding experience make

          The first complete program I ever wrote was in Basic. It took an input number and rounded it to the 10s or 100s digit. I had learned just enough to get it running. It was using strings and a bunch of if statements, so it didn’t work for more than 3 digit numbers. I didn’t learn about modulo operations until later.

          In all honesty, I’m still pretty proud of it, I was in 4th or 5th grade after all 😂. I’ve now been programming for 20+ years.

          • Wiz@midwest.social
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            10 days ago

            Hey, about out to an interactive fiction dude/dudette!

            I programmed in TADS many years ago, but I want to learn and use inform, because I want a Z-code game like my timeless heroes at Infocom.

            • PoolloverNathan@programming.dev
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              10 days ago

              I’m not really into writing interactive fiction; I just tried it a little since it seemed neat. It turns out that I’m not great at coming up with things to write about, which makes it hard to actually write. Inform 7 makes some decisions that complicate using it with a programming background; I’m considering trying to write my own language for similar purposes (but different paradigms).

    • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
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      10 days ago

      Which frameworks? 😂

      Ruby on Rails was probably the peak of the hype wave. It had a tutorial that any manager could follow to build a simple data driven website in minutes.

      • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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        10 days ago

        Is that a “framework”? Anyhow it was first released a year after you claimed this all happened.

        • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
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          10 days ago

          Ruby was the really hot one.

          .Net accomplished very similar outcomes and caused a lesser version of the same hyperbole, a few years earlier.

          Yes, both are called frameworks.

          Of course, I’m going from an old person’s memory, so who knows or cares? You can learn from my experiences, or not.

          If you check my post history, you’ll see plenty of evidence that I am, as claimed, a cranky old software developer.

          I don’t see why anyone would want to pretend to be me. It’s not that much fun.