Brian SlettenFrom @garymarcus on BlueSky:
A computer scientist’s perspective on vibe coding:
Isaka@bsletten Well said. I’d add Microsoft Access to the list. Furthermore, there are tons of tools that can automatically create very basic functioning apps for you. I’d so far just not reacted to the hype. It won’t be long before some learn some lessens the hard way, that’s also fun to watch.
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)Access is the exemplar here. I worked with a few companies that, 20 years ago, produced in-house CRUD ‘applications’ entirely in Access using almost entirely the GUI, with no in-house programmers. You drew the GUI, connected it up to fields in the database, created queries with drag-and-drop, and drew forms to display the results.
Access had the world’s worst branding. It was a surprisingly good RAD tool for business apps, bundled with the world’s worst database. Microsoft sold it as a database. But Access could also work as a front end for SQL Server (which was a fairly good database, even 20 years ago). And that let you scale these business apps up to the requirements of a moderate-sized enterprise.
I think Power Apps are the newest thing in this space from MS. They use the Calc language from Excel and a visual GUI designer. Excel had a reactive programming model before anyone knew that was a thing with a name and now can even use remote SQL databases as a data source. There are a billion people writing programs in Excel.
Ölbaum@david_chisnall @isaka @bsletten I had a phase where I did a lot of REALBasic on the Mac. It made it easy to write GUI apps, but I also remember it had network facilities to write a client and server. I wouldn’t have had any idea how to do that in C at the time. I would have learnt it if I needed, which I didn’t, but thanks to REALBasic, I wrote a couple simple network apps to toy with it, without having a need, and thus I learned something in the process.