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The reason the visual languages even come up so often is because people outside of programming believe that code is the hard part. It looks scary, so if we jus

The reason the visual languages even come up so often is because people outside of programming believe that code is the hard part. It looks scary, so if we just took that part out everyone could be a programmer. Which makes you wonder why every single attempt to do this makes easy things trivial and everything else difficult to impossible. Programming languages are (usually) tools created to help get things done. They're not (usually) there to make your life harder, or to force you to learn something. So why does it seem like that's the starting assumption to every alternative proposed? (NOTE: If your scope is limited, it makes sense. Unreal Engine 4's Shader Blueprints are great, not only is the scope limited but the visual approach allows you to preview each step at a glance.)

arvinsim 8y ago
I guess it's somewhat the same complaint with math and musical notation. Some mathematical expressions are very complex and compact but people use it since it is the best we got.
- reificator 8y ago
  Yeah exactly. It's not that there's no improvement to be had, it's that you're not going to get far if you assume the current system is there to make things harder. I think part of it is, despite widespread acceptance of puns, most people seem to think English (or any other widely spoken language) is a lot less ambiguous than it really is. There's a reason legal documents are the way they are as well. Granted in that field there is sometimes incentive to obfuscate your meaning, but I still don't think that's the reason for most of the difficulty in outsiders easily reading and writing legalese. The fact of the matter is, expressing logic (or music) in words is hard. The more detailed you need to be, the harder it gets. That's why the example of making a sandwich comes up so often in introductions to programming[0]. If people can't express in their native language how to do something they do every day, in an unambiguous enough manner for a "computer" to perform the action, that speaks to a deeper problem than the representation being too hard. [0]: It's not a great example, because the instructor usually is going to maliciously try to find any logic hole they can, making it feel more like a hazing ritual than a lesson to be learned. But it does come up a lot for a reason.

arvinsim 8y ago

I guess it's somewhat the same complaint with math and musical notation. Some mathematical expressions are very complex and compact but people use it since it is the best we got.

reificator 8y ago
Yeah exactly. It's not that there's no improvement to be had, it's that you're not going to get far if you assume the current system is there to make things harder. I think part of it is, despite widespread acceptance of puns, most people seem to think English (or any other widely spoken language) is a lot less ambiguous than it really is. There's a reason legal documents are the way they are as well. Granted in that field there is sometimes incentive to obfuscate your meaning, but I still don't think that's the reason for most of the difficulty in outsiders easily reading and writing legalese. The fact of the matter is, expressing logic (or music) in words is hard. The more detailed you need to be, the harder it gets. That's why the example of making a sandwich comes up so often in introductions to programming[0]. If people can't express in their native language how to do something they do every day, in an unambiguous enough manner for a "computer" to perform the action, that speaks to a deeper problem than the representation being too hard. [0]: It's not a great example, because the instructor usually is going to maliciously try to find any logic hole they can, making it feel more like a hazing ritual than a lesson to be learned. But it does come up a lot for a reason.