Well, certainly, miracles are always possible. I mean, not actual miracles. Unlikely events are always possible.
So, Amazon is a simple site. Good to know. Certainly, minimal degree of difficulty in running one of the largest marketplaces on the internet.
And that's why we say that most of what most programs do is easy stuff, stuff that can be conveniently expressed in a natural language. And that, in turn, is why we like programming in Plain English: the thoughts in our heads are typed in as Plain English "pseudo code" and, with a tweak here and there, that pseudo code actually compiles and runs. And is self-documenting, to boot.
It's like the index in the back of a book. And it works. For beginners and experienced users.
Grouping menus by function makes sense. Microsoft's grouping may leave much to be desired at times, but the concept is correct.
Well, you are simply wrong and ignorant of what makes programming hard. Abstraction and logic are the two things I've seen new developers struggle with the most. What they don't struggle with are the various language features and syntactical anomalies. Gerry, this is what you don't understand and what has been brought up, numerous times, in this thread.
I haven't had those problems with any of my students, many of whom have gone on to lucrative careers as professional programmers.
Okay, then, here's what that kind of thing looks like in Plain English. This is the essence of a pong-like game I wrote with a six-year-old where you try to stop a moving bird with a baseball bat:
To do it:
Draw the screen's box with the black color.
Move the bat. Draw the bat's picture.
Move the bird. Draw the bird's picture.
Check for collision.
Draw the score.
Refresh the screen.
If the escape key is not down, repeat.
To move the bat:
Put the mouse's spot into a spot.
Put the screen's right minus 1 inch into the spot's x.
Center the bat's picture on the spot.
To move a bird:
Move the bird's picture right the horizontal bump.
Move the bird's picture down the vertical bump.
If the bird's right is greater than the screen's right, play the pop sound; subtract 1 from the score; negate the horizontal bump.
If the bird's left is less than the screen's left, play the boink sound; negate the horizontal bump.
If the bird's bottom is greater than the screen's bottom, play the boink sound; negate the vertical bump.
If the bird's top is less than the screen's top, play the boink sound; negate the vertical bump.
To check for collision:
Put the bird's picture's center into a spot.
Put the bat's picture's box into a box.
If the spot is not in the box, exit.
Say "ow".
Add 1 to the score.
Add 1/64 inch to the horizontal bump.
Add 1/64 inch to the vertical bump.
Negate the horizontal bump.
Negate the vertical bump.
Move the bird's picture left 1/2 inch.
To draw the score:
Put the score into a string.
Put the green color into a color.
If the score is less than 0, put the red color into the color.
Draw the string in the center of the screen's box with the color and the font.
There's more stuff, of course, like type and variable definitions and some initialization code, but that's the gist of it.
There is also nothing self-documenting about your code.
//get the existing pixel:
pngpixel * pixel = GetPixel(x,y);
Your entire premise seems to be based on telling people that what they think is wrong...
More lies. Post the entirety of the code that makes a working game in your compiler. Not the trimmed down BS that will not work at all.
The guy is a fraud.
It also seems the ball in his pong game only ever moves at 45 degree angles. Depending on the velocity of your paddle at the point of contact, a ball in pong can bounce at various angles.
He also doesn't seem to have timing in his game. Looks to me like it would run as fast as the computer can process the statements.
There's no sound processing, so somewhere in the background there are things to handle sound card drivers. Oh no wait, he still relies on the painted whore to do all the real work, using their libraries via more complicated real code in his "noodle".
He says it's the gist of it and that there's "more stuff" as he does in every other example. He completely fails to note that the "other stuff" is where all the real work of the program is.
All he seems to be proving is that with enough hidden code, programming is easy.
Kind of like the way he boils down Amazon to "Display the product" and then brags about how easy it was.
It's all smoke and mirrors, lots of hand waving but no substance. I still say the work is interesting, but not to the extent he wants to pass it off as the future of programming.
I hasten to add that I'm an optimist in many ways; but I'm realist enough to know that the innate foolishness of men can drag anything down to a lower common denominator: it may very well be that the end that's in store for all of us "under the sun" is much different from the bright and cheery picture I've been painting. But hope floats. God forbid that I be one who tries to sink it!
...at least to me would be easier and less ambiguous if it were just Python or any other higher level scripting language.
BASIC: PRINT "Hello, world!"
C: printf("Hello, world!\n");
C++: std::cout << "Hello, world!\n";
Delphi: Writeln('Hello, world!');
Go: println("Hello, world!")
Java: System.out.println("Hello, world!");
JavaScript: console.log('Hello, world!');
Objective-C: NSLog(@"Hello, world!\n");
Perl: print "Hello, world!\n";
Perl 5.10: say 'Hello, world!';
PHP: <?php print ('Hello, world!'); ?>
Python 2: print "Hello, world!"
Python 3: print("Hello, world!")
Ruby: puts "Hello, world!"
Visual Basic: Console.WriteLine("Hello, world!")