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Toward the next generation of programming tools
- david927 8y agoThis is a funny article. The author essentially says, "Alan Kay says software is bad but he isn’t being entirely fair; he's missing things -- small, incremental improvements in some tools." and "The future will be visual programming. I have no idea what it could look like. But it's already happening. But not in a concrete way. But it could happen and in fact it would be easy if we weren't stuck in the past."
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y agoI don't get this push towards visual programming. Visual programming works great for visual stuff (for example the Forms builder in VB6) but for general programming, not so much. Programming is about abstract communication. If you look at human history, we see a progression from visual (cave drawings, pictograms) to text (cuneiform, alphabetic languages). If you look at law which is in the business of trying to specifying stuff in detail, the murder statutes are written in text, not with pictures of knives and guns and a big red "x".
- mimixco 8y agoIt's CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) all over again! This idea rears its (ugly) head every few years. It isn't a help to programmers. The reason we use text for programming isn't "because punch cards," though as a former IBM mainframe programmer I appreciate the analogy. It's because text is an incredibly efficient way of communicating even the most complex information. A side note here: One of the reasons for Korea's rise to power as an "Asian Tiger" is that, many moons ago, one of their emperors decided to break away from the Chinese system of pictographs and replace it with a phonetic alphabet, allowing anyone to spell and pronounce words. The result was one of the highest degrees of literacy among nations anywhere. Alphabets are good for communicating with people and with processors, too.