3 ms·

> A program is so much more than a flat collection of lines of text stored on a filesystem. > Our tools force us to "reduce" a program and dumb it down to a bun

by contras1970 9y ago

> A program is so much more than a flat collection of lines of text stored on a filesystem. > Our tools force us to "reduce" a program and dumb it down to a bunch of flat files. Agreed with a reservation: text sucks, but we have nothing better, and your post does not suggest an improvement. If you have something more concrete on your mind, I have some specific questions here I think we'll need good answers before we jump the text-based ship. > It also adds cognitive overhead for naming things and so on. I take this you advocate going without textual names. Presumably, if we didn't name things in our programs, programming (both "writing" and "reading" them) would be easier. If this is actually your point: * How are our tools going to present "source code" to us? * How are we going to refer to pieces of our programs, in spoken and written communication? These things have great impact, right now I can get into a discussion of execle(), execl(), execlp(), execve(), execv() and execvp() (these are pretty average regarding mutilation in the interest of brevity, at least they're pronouncable[1]). > Imagine an editor that allowed you to [...] view a function, select it in > the editor and right click on its name and click "Write documentation", or > "View entities calling this function", "View tests involving this function", > "View authors". * What would "view a function" mean in a nontextual programming language mean? * "Write documentation" implies more text. Doesn't the argument against text in programming languages apply to documentation as well, just more forcefully? What is your proposed solution to keep documentation in sync with the code? * What does "View entities calling this function" mean in a universe without names? [1] cf. wcsnrtombs(), wcspbrk(), wcsrchr(), wcsrtombs().

borplk 9y ago
A better alternative is theoretically possible we just haven't devoted significant time and resources to it. It is possible to create an "editor" that edits the objects of the application but not as text. It can look almost identical to a text editor but under the hood it knows more about each "node" that you are interacting with. One challenge is that sometimes these applications are not flexible enough to deal with "temporarily invalid" programs. So they become rigid and feel less flexible than a normal text editor. But those challenges can be overcome. This suddenly opens the door to so many wonderful possibilities. I know because I have worked on an experimental prototype for such a thing. For example text-based version control will be automatically obsolete. Your IDE will have the history of every single piece of your program (program is stored as a rich object in the database). Your IDE can suddenly present different "layers" of information to you in a clean way. For example you can "hide" an entire block of code and just label it with "Check if user has sufficient privileges". Then the IDE can allow you to expand and explore that section of the program if you wish. But otherwise you can collapse it and just scan over it with your eyes. The one-dimensional flat nature of a text-based system discourages us from attaching additional information to the pieces of the program. We need a way to be able to "navigate" through multiple dimensions of information in relation to the obejcts in the program. For keeping documentation in sync, the IDE allows you to view/create/modify the documentation for a given object of the program therefore it can guarantee certain things. Your environment is fully aware of the relationship between an object and its corresponding documentation. It's not just a piece of string that gets ignored. So when you change the body of a function it can pop up a warning and say "Hey you have modified this function since revision #48452 but the documentation has not been changed. Click here to update the documentation.". Your environment will be aware of, for example, the relationship between tests and obejcts (such as functions). So it can tell you in a 100% reliable way, not based on file name conventions and error-prone parsing, that hey across your project the following functions have no tests associated with them. There's enormous inertia against an initiative like this because of our dependence on existing technologies. But we cannot advance software engineering to the next stage unless we move beyond the "a program is a bunch of files that we view and edit like a book" mentality. We need environments that are much more aware and in-sync with the broader context of a program/project as a whole and in a reliably-structured manner. Check this out as a basic example: https://isomorf.io/#!/demos https://isomorf.io/#!/demos (I'm not affiliated with them)

borplk 9y ago

A better alternative is theoretically possible we just haven't devoted significant time and resources to it. It is possible to create an "editor" that edits the objects of the application but not as text. It can look almost identical to a text editor but under the hood it knows more about each "node" that you are interacting with. One challenge is that sometimes these applications are not flexible enough to deal with "temporarily invalid" programs. So they become rigid and feel less flexible than a normal text editor. But those challenges can be overcome. This suddenly opens the door to so many wonderful possibilities. I know because I have worked on an experimental prototype for such a thing. For example text-based version control will be automatically obsolete. Your IDE will have the history of every single piece of your program (program is stored as a rich object in the database). Your IDE can suddenly present different "layers" of information to you in a clean way. For example you can "hide" an entire block of code and just label it with "Check if user has sufficient privileges". Then the IDE can allow you to expand and explore that section of the program if you wish. But otherwise you can collapse it and just scan over it with your eyes. The one-dimensional flat nature of a text-based system discourages us from attaching additional information to the pieces of the program. We need a way to be able to "navigate" through multiple dimensions of information in relation to the obejcts in the program. For keeping documentation in sync, the IDE allows you to view/create/modify the documentation for a given object of the program therefore it can guarantee certain things. Your environment is fully aware of the relationship between an object and its corresponding documentation. It's not just a piece of string that gets ignored. So when you change the body of a function it can pop up a warning and say "Hey you have modified this function since revision #48452 but the documentation has not been changed. Click here to update the documentation.". Your environment will be aware of, for example, the relationship between tests and obejcts (such as functions). So it can tell you in a 100% reliable way, not based on file name conventions and error-prone parsing, that hey across your project the following functions have no tests associated with them. There's enormous inertia against an initiative like this because of our dependence on existing technologies. But we cannot advance software engineering to the next stage unless we move beyond the "a program is a bunch of files that we view and edit like a book" mentality. We need environments that are much more aware and in-sync with the broader context of a program/project as a whole and in a reliably-structured manner. Check this out as a basic example: https://isomorf.io/#!/demos https://isomorf.io/#!/demos (I'm not affiliated with them)