Re: Is Programming Obsolete?

On Mon, 8 Apr 2024 13:31:33 -0000 (UTC), Rich wrote:

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

>
That is inherent in the nature of the problem it is trying to solve:
automate an interface--the GUI--which was never designed for automatic
operation. No matter how you slice and dice it, that kind of thing
inherently turns out to be fiddly and fragile.

 
But that part wasn't the problem.  AutoHotKey included function calls to
do that, and once one found the function call to perform "step x" that
one wanted, it worked.

In my experience, that is very much part of the problem. I have done this
sort of thing in the past--thankfully, not lately.

E.g. bring up a dialog box to enter a number. I have a template for the
event sequence, to do the initial menu selection, then have my code insert
the (variable) sequence of keystrokes for the number, then end with the
sequence for clicking the OK button.

Only if you do it a little too fast, the text field or the OK button might
not actually be enabled yet, and so some part of the sequence gets ignored
and the whole thing goes badly wrong. So you stick in a tenth-of-a-second
delay somewhere, entirely through trial-and-error, until it seems to work.

Then later on somebody reports that it sometimes fails in a different
place. But of course it works for you. So you then have to try the
sequence multiple times, until you see it fail that one time, and then you
have to figure out why and come up with another tweak to the sequence to
fix it.

All this take programming skills--which ordinary users don’t have. So who
are these macro-recorder thingies aimed at? They seem designed to pretend
that there is no programming involved in using them, but on the other hand
it can take a lot of work to use them reliably. And so you end up with the
worst of both worlds.