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"Text is the most socially useful communication technology. It works well in 1:1, 1:N, and M:N modes. It can be indexed and searched efficiently, even by hand.
by devcriollo 9y ago
"Text is the most socially useful communication technology. It works well in 1:1, 1:N, and M:N modes. It can be indexed and searched efficiently, even by hand. It can be translated. It can be produced and consumed at variable speeds. It is asynchronous. It can be compared, diffed, clustered, corrected, summarized and filtered algorithmically. It permits multiparty editing. It permits branching conversations, lurking, annotation, quoting, reviewing, summarizing, structured responses, exegesis, even fan fic. The breadth, scale and depth of ways people use text is unmatched by anything. There is no equivalent in any other communication technology for the social, communicative, cognitive and reflective complexity of a library full of books or an internet full of postings. Nothing else comes close."
http://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html http://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html
- kbuchanan 9y agoI agree with this statement, wholeheartedly. I do, however, think programming languages could benefit from more visual augmentation. A program, over time, takes on more complexity than a programmer can hold in his mind, and eventually, the program's design will elude him. A disconnect appears between the text he types in the moment and the original design of the program. The sum total of the program's code no longer resembles the problems at hand. Here, I think, visual tools are underutilized. Not as code crafting tools, but as tools for reflection. Reflection on dependency trees, deviation in style, orphaned code, the ability to visualize how and where data might flow in unexpected ways, etc. Webpack's stats.json comes to mind for dependency tracing. Statically typed languages obviously have a leg up here.
- nichochar 9y agoThis is, I think, the idea behind IDEs
- karmelapple 9y agoYet which IDEs aren't simply really nice text editors with some refactoring help built in? Making these visualizations central to the IDE would be exciting.
- kwhitefoot 9y ago> Yet which IDEs aren't simply really nice text editors with some refactoring help built in? All the IDEs I use are more like: Yet which IDEs aren't simply really _horrible_ text editors with some refactoring help built in?
- minademian 9y agoYeah. I feel like the depth of OP's writeup blurs the lines between working with an application framework, API, and IDEs. I was under the impression that visual programming is different from IDEs or frameworks...
- nicwilson 9y agoIf you ever want to horrify yourself, google LabView, a truly horrible piece of software.
- reitanqild 9y agoI actually liked it in a way. Not my favourite but absolutely not horrifying to a student. Now that I think about it though I wonder what huge merges look like.
- vosper 9y agoI have a dream that one day we'll collectively realize that "buying programmers the best tools" means the most powerful, and not the shiniest. Then we'll all be running ultra-wide monitors with room for many different visual aides on the one screen, backed by the CPU horsepower (overclocked and liquid cooled, if necessary) to make it all fast. And, hopefully, we'll see what an IDE can really be.
- danblick 9y agoAs long as we're speculating: I kind of dream that maybe we'll see programming environments that take advantage of VR. Humans are really good at remembering spaces. ("Describe for me your childhood bedroom." or "What did your third grade teacher look like?") There's already the idea of "memory palaces" [1] suggesting you can take advantage of spatial memory for other purposes. I wonder, what would it be like to learn or search a codebase by walking through it and looking around? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
- TeMPOraL 9y ago> Humans are really good at remembering spaces. ("Describe for me your childhood bedroom." or "What did your third grade teacher look like?") Some humans. I honestly can't answer you those two questions. I'm much better in remembering what I just read than what space I just saw, and I absolutely suck at remembering (not to mention describing) faces. If you mugged me I probably wouldn't be able to describe you to police beyond the basics like gender and height (I probably won't be remembering what you were wearing). I say this because being good at remembering spaces is like "everyone sketch a picture when trying to convey an idea" elsewhere in the thread - both are examples of what some people do, and it may be surprising to discover that not all humans are good at it.
- futhey 9y agoI have face blindness. You may as well, or at least some degree of aphantasia. No reason for concern, but there is supposedly an incredibly low occurrence of either.
- laythea 9y agoI agree because I hate the pain of debugging. I disagree because if something takes that away, then where is the skill in my work?
- AriaMinaei 9y ago"This is so bad, it's not even wrong." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
- gryfft 9y agoWould you mind enlightening me as to the fallacy you perceive in that post? It seems well-formed to me.