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I do not agree with the freeform nature of viewpoint. The possibilities are boundless but you have to temper the boundlessness with the fact that our brains ar

I do not agree with the freeform nature of viewpoint. The possibilities are boundless but you have to temper the boundlessness with the fact that our brains are biased and specialized to work in certain ways. Case in point can you communicate your entire post in terms of pictures? Is there any form of non linear diagramming you can do on a 2D canvas that can deliver your point better than text? If I give you the freedom of a 2D canvas to convey your point can you convey it better than the restricted form of text? No. In fact text was the best way to communicate your point. Restriction and lack of freedom are often more effective tools than ones that are completely unrestricted and boundless. It doesn't matter whether you're a visual thinker. When it comes to parsing and conveying complex information our brains have a dedicated module for parsing information that comes in as a linear and serial string of symbols. If you can talk, listen read or write than you can be exceptional at writing programs that do this. Your brain is biologically biased to operate this way. That being said if I show you a picture of a dog, you will learn more about what that dog looks like than any amount of textual description. There is no denying that certain things are communicated better visually and other things are communicated serially. It's hard to delineate axioms that communicate exactly what is better communicated visually and what is better communicated textually. I can only talk in terms of examples: Your ideas on visual programming is better communicated through text, what your car or face looks like is better communicated through pictures. One thing that has worked throughout history is a combination of text and pictures. Powerpoint. A linear slide show where each slide delivers serial text and pictures in parallel to the human brain. The future of visual programming, if it occurs at all, will ultimately be some form of a combination of diagrams and restricted serial strings of symbols following the same principles as powerpoint. I don't believe it has anything to do with foundational computer science but rather the language must be built around the biases and limitations of the human brain. We build biased textual languages because our brains are partly biased towards text. I have an idea about what that would look like and how that would work in terms of maintaining programmer productivity. Also I didn't see your dissertation (assuming your name is Don Hopkins) in your post.

DonHopkins 6y ago
>Is there any form of non linear diagramming you can do on a 2D canvas that can deliver your point better than text? I could write a JavaScript program just for you, that drew blinking animated sparkly text in a canvas which said "WATCH THE VIDEO I POSTED", but there would still be no point to that, since you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. Because if you actually watched the video, you would realize that Viewpoint is all about text. Nobody claimed it was "better than text", or that it was trying to get rid of text. You'd know that if you had watched the video. But you don't know that, so I can conclude that me simply writing text was not enough to get you to watch the video. >I have an idea about what that would look like and how that would work in terms of maintaining programmer productivity. That's very nice. And do you know how much that's worth? Nothing. Not only are ideas worthless without an implementation, but also ideas that you haven't even bothered to write down without implementing are worth even less, because they're a waste of everyone's time, and not tempered by reality or experience or empirical testing or iterative design and development or stakeholder requirements or user feedback. What point is there to telling me that you have an idea about something you haven't implemented, or even written down, or drawn a picture of? Or did you forget to provide a link to your own dissertation, a video, and a runnable demo? It's much better for you to spend your precious time doing difficult tedious things like writing down and implementing and testing your brilliant ideas yourself, instead of having so much fun talking about how great it would be if only you wrote it down for other people to read, payed somebody on Fiverr to draw a picture of your idea for you, or found some out-of-work but highly skilled programming with nothing better to do, who was willing to pair up with a starry-eyed "idea guy", and work night and day for free, on your sincere verbal promise of equity and exposure, implementing your grandiose but unwritten ideas, in the hopes that you don't get angry at them for not precisely interpreting and efficiently engineering your brilliant vision correctly, or suddenly change your mind once you see what they actually implemented that did not perfectly live up to your idealistic expectations and nebulous handwaving. Good luck with that! Let me know when it ships.
- crimsonalucard 6y ago
  You misunderstand. I watched it. I'm talking about information delivered in a serial format. A linear and ordered ingestion of information. I'm not talking about text per se, but the property of text that makes all programs follow a linear order of execution. Viewpoint is anything but. Viewpoint is all over the place. It's basically a 2D canvas with no order. Sure it has text but that text is used more like a random label with random coordinates. There's no linear process of instructions delivered or ingested. What you see is basically a reactive canvas with arbitrary coordinates. The universe we live in has a linear one dimensional property that follows the arrow of time. Viewpoint fails to represent this concept symbolically. The process of time, the process of execution. However you choose to represent this concept, all programming languages must have some sort of way of representing time as a spacial dimension. For text it is left to right, top to bottom reading order, for viewpoint it does not exist. What's more all the symbols can be destroyed as text is just an abstraction over a pixel drawing interface. The axioms (pixels) of this interface are too low level. But this is just a minor flaw. The main flaw I see with Viewpoint is that it's not clear how computation can be modeled with these pixels. How do you represent logic? Or, and, nor, xor? Is viewpoint Turing complete? Time is an intrinsic part of logic, a programming must be able to represent logic and time by using only spacial dimensions.

DonHopkins 6y ago

>Is there any form of non linear diagramming you can do on a 2D canvas that can deliver your point better than text? I could write a JavaScript program just for you, that drew blinking animated sparkly text in a canvas which said "WATCH THE VIDEO I POSTED", but there would still be no point to that, since you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. Because if you actually watched the video, you would realize that Viewpoint is all about text. Nobody claimed it was "better than text", or that it was trying to get rid of text. You'd know that if you had watched the video. But you don't know that, so I can conclude that me simply writing text was not enough to get you to watch the video. >I have an idea about what that would look like and how that would work in terms of maintaining programmer productivity. That's very nice. And do you know how much that's worth? Nothing. Not only are ideas worthless without an implementation, but also ideas that you haven't even bothered to write down without implementing are worth even less, because they're a waste of everyone's time, and not tempered by reality or experience or empirical testing or iterative design and development or stakeholder requirements or user feedback. What point is there to telling me that you have an idea about something you haven't implemented, or even written down, or drawn a picture of? Or did you forget to provide a link to your own dissertation, a video, and a runnable demo? It's much better for you to spend your precious time doing difficult tedious things like writing down and implementing and testing your brilliant ideas yourself, instead of having so much fun talking about how great it would be if only you wrote it down for other people to read, payed somebody on Fiverr to draw a picture of your idea for you, or found some out-of-work but highly skilled programming with nothing better to do, who was willing to pair up with a starry-eyed "idea guy", and work night and day for free, on your sincere verbal promise of equity and exposure, implementing your grandiose but unwritten ideas, in the hopes that you don't get angry at them for not precisely interpreting and efficiently engineering your brilliant vision correctly, or suddenly change your mind once you see what they actually implemented that did not perfectly live up to your idealistic expectations and nebulous handwaving. Good luck with that! Let me know when it ships.

crimsonalucard 6y ago
You misunderstand. I watched it. I'm talking about information delivered in a serial format. A linear and ordered ingestion of information. I'm not talking about text per se, but the property of text that makes all programs follow a linear order of execution. Viewpoint is anything but. Viewpoint is all over the place. It's basically a 2D canvas with no order. Sure it has text but that text is used more like a random label with random coordinates. There's no linear process of instructions delivered or ingested. What you see is basically a reactive canvas with arbitrary coordinates. The universe we live in has a linear one dimensional property that follows the arrow of time. Viewpoint fails to represent this concept symbolically. The process of time, the process of execution. However you choose to represent this concept, all programming languages must have some sort of way of representing time as a spacial dimension. For text it is left to right, top to bottom reading order, for viewpoint it does not exist. What's more all the symbols can be destroyed as text is just an abstraction over a pixel drawing interface. The axioms (pixels) of this interface are too low level. But this is just a minor flaw. The main flaw I see with Viewpoint is that it's not clear how computation can be modeled with these pixels. How do you represent logic? Or, and, nor, xor? Is viewpoint Turing complete? Time is an intrinsic part of logic, a programming must be able to represent logic and time by using only spacial dimensions.