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I didn't watch the talk. So please let me know if I'm mistaken about this one particular point: That the author seems to be warning of limitations of certain s

I didn't watch the talk. So please let me know if I'm mistaken about this one particular point: That the author seems to be warning of limitations of certain solutions, but generalising those limitations to GUIs as a whole. This is wrong. There is nothing inherent in a GUI that would make it unsuitable for coding. Code does not equal text. Code, can be represented in many ways. An AST is code. Text, in a certain syntax, would represent the same code. And so can a GUI. Now, is there a GUI for general-purpose programming that I'd want to use today for production work? No. Will there be one in the future? I believe so. But people discounting coding GUIs left and right, just because they haven't seen a good example of it yet, only discourages others to explore it further. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, to some degree. Anyway, here is a text/GUI-based programming environment (single data / multiple representations) that you might want to play with: luna-lang.org

scroot 9y ago
> But people discounting coding GUIs left and right, just because they haven't seen a good example of it yet, only discourages others to explore it further. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, to some degree And there are good examples from the past, too. History is important and is often ignored by the wider programming community. Personal computing was more or less invented in GUI programming systems. There are environments and architectures from the 1970s that are highly relevant today but that are ignored or downplayed in the mainstream. Such an attitude will stifle progress for sure.
flukus 9y ago
> But people discounting coding GUIs left and right, just because they haven't seen a good example of it yet It's not just because I haven't seen a good example, it's because we have 50 years of bad examples. When something has been tried and failed by so many people for such a length of time you have to at least consider the possibility that the idea is just a fundamentally bad one. I think I'm more likely to see flying cars in my life time then a decent GUI for general purpose programming. The problem with both is that they are fundamentally flawed.
- TuringTest 9y ago
  Arguably, modern IDEs are decent GUIs for general purpose programming. Comparted to programming by editing files in a bash shell, they provide lots of visual tools (autocomplete, debugging) to track the dependencies between objects in the code, which is what a graphical interface provides over independent files.

scroot 9y ago

> But people discounting coding GUIs left and right, just because they haven't seen a good example of it yet, only discourages others to explore it further. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, to some degree And there are good examples from the past, too. History is important and is often ignored by the wider programming community. Personal computing was more or less invented in GUI programming systems. There are environments and architectures from the 1970s that are highly relevant today but that are ignored or downplayed in the mainstream. Such an attitude will stifle progress for sure.

flukus 9y ago

> But people discounting coding GUIs left and right, just because they haven't seen a good example of it yet It's not just because I haven't seen a good example, it's because we have 50 years of bad examples. When something has been tried and failed by so many people for such a length of time you have to at least consider the possibility that the idea is just a fundamentally bad one. I think I'm more likely to see flying cars in my life time then a decent GUI for general purpose programming. The problem with both is that they are fundamentally flawed.

TuringTest 9y ago
Arguably, modern IDEs are decent GUIs for general purpose programming. Comparted to programming by editing files in a bash shell, they provide lots of visual tools (autocomplete, debugging) to track the dependencies between objects in the code, which is what a graphical interface provides over independent files.