🚀 go-pugleaf

 This really became a major thread...
The "Coding shouldn't be needed"/"There is no other way" debate has changed
very little over the past 20 years.

 Without joining the fun once again, I would however like to make an
observation�.

A few days ago I watched my son using a modern graphics program (3d studio
max). In less that an hour he created an image of a mountain, with
glittering water in front of it, and an animated zeppelin flying over it.

 It was not just a question of assembling pieces; the mountain was build by
applying successive filters to spatial noise generators, the zeppelin was
drawn from spleens, and then interpolated, changing parameters and watching
the result.

The prorgram allowed him to draw (and animate) things in very different ways
from the way it would have been done with paper and ink/pens/airbrushes etc.
While no doubt any good artist could have improved on the textures used with
a pen, and done better roundings on the zeppelin it would have taken many
years to acquire all the skills in drawing, perspective, lighting, drawing
shadows etc, etc, and even so few would have the artistic ability to ever be
able to express that knowledge in frame after frame of animation.

My son has of course spent countless hours playing around with parameters,
light sources, moving cameras, etc prior to be able to create the scene, but
he had not spent years learning to use pens and air-brushes or single frame
cameras.

 The point is of course that in this area the program developers have been
able to capture all this domain expertise into a "good enough" form to
create really useful results. It was possible to express a fairly high level
intent despite lack of even basic technical skills of drawing. Not only that
but they has found ways (spatial noise, etc) to moved the expression of the
result to a much higher abstraction level, and also allows creative
expression at this level of abstractions. These processes would probably
have seemed meaningless if described to a skilled painter a generation ago,
yet they are very useful.

 We have not by a long shot come that far in program development despite the
fact that we have been at it for at least 50 years. This is not from lack of
trying. Creating better programming environments has been a favorite pastime
for many of us.

 We have simply for the most part failed to find better ways of expressing
what we want to do than writing detailed code in an imperative language.

I don't believe it has to be this way, or that it will remain this way for
much longer.