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Guess the next number in this sequence: 10, 9, 8.5, 8.25, 8.125...

by (Login Mikrondel)
Moderator

If you guessed 8.0625, you're right! If you guessed 7, you were wrong.

My point is that just because languages keep getting easier and easier doesn't mean that they will ever get easier than a certain point. Maybe we're just approaching a "maximum easiness point", which we can't get past - at least not without some new breakthrough in artificial intelligence, anyway.

Also you say: "required skill of the programmer will be going down"

The goal of "easy" languages like Python is to increase programmer productivity. It's to save time, and cut down on the amount of code that needs to be written.

Sure you can draw a rotating cube in a few lines of Python code, explain each line to a complete beginner, and they'll say "yeah I think I can see what's going on". And if you tried the same thing in C you would lose them very quickly.

But ask the beginner to make the Python cube bounce around on the screen, or find a bug in some code, and they too will be lost.

Python removes a lot of the "copy-paste" code, but doesn't reduce the overall required skill very much. Especially when things break, programmers still need to understand the things that the language is hiding from them.

Posted on Jul 16, 2009, 9:34 PM

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