Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Jeff_Brown 2689 days ago
The SQL commands it would take to do what he did in a few seconds would I think have taken a decent coder half an hour. But even that underestimates the usefulness of this kind of GUI, because with the GUI you wouldn't have to know what you're trying to do in advance, whereas with code you do.

The coding space is big, permitting lots of invalid state -- most of the programs you could write are not just wrong but gibberish. Using a GUI like this reduces the problem space enormously; the comparison feels akin to the one between grabbing a live fish and connecting Lego blocks.
1 comments
nubslayer 2689 days ago
It's useful, but one still basically needs to plan ahead, look up commands, and imagine things.

It would be more useful if it weren't an OSX-only closed source demo.

link
Jeff_Brown 2689 days ago
I agree about its availability.

I think it's far more useful than you seem to, though. Reducing the problem space is huge. It's why macro programming (ala Lisp) is so dangerous. It's why I left Haskell for Python, and why I often wish I was using Idris[1], which pretty much reads your mind and writes what you meant. It's true of coding generally, but SQL programming especially, that there's a conceptually obvious, small space of reasonable programs, but because we're writing in text, we're free to roam over an enormous superspace of (occasionally) wrong or (usually) meaningless programs.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOtKD7ml0NU

link
nubslayer 2689 days ago
I don't really have an OSX computer to use it on, so it's not that useful to me. I could probably make the same or better in a few hours.

Not sure exactly what you mean by wrong or meaningless programs. (edit3) I'm not sure it's possible to write a meaningless SQL statement.

Edit: it seems like the authors don't see it as that useful. I think the page said they are still looking for use-cases, or something. Have you contacted them?

Edit2 (fta): "However, as of Jan 2019 we’re tabling the project until we have a concrete, motivating use case to inform further development."

link