5 ms·

Does anyone feel we are still in the silent film era of computer programming? Will we ever advance from text editors into something else and leave Vim, Emacs e

Does anyone feel we are still in the silent film era of computer programming? Will we ever advance from text editors into something else and leave Vim, Emacs etc. forever behind for good?

kens 6y ago
The 80-column IBM punch card was invented in 1928 and here we are almost 100 years later writing programs as a sequence of 80-column lines of text. It seems pretty obvious to me that we're stuck in a local maximum. I don't think visual programming is the solution but there must be another alternative. Sort of like how databases are based on text but are much more than text.
- DonHopkins 6y ago
  What we don't need are 160-column punched cards. The proper response to "640K ought to be enough for anybody" is virtual memory, not 1280K. People used to complain about Macromedia Director only having 24 layers, so they increased it to 48. But then what are you supposed to do if you want to make a map of the United States: leave out Alaska and Hawaii?
daenz 6y ago
I do! I am currently in the very early stages of creating a VR-based language. I believe that if we can represent programs more intuitively to our spatial, visual, and tactile senses, we can unlock more programming potential in more people.
- hour_glass 6y ago
  Awesome, what changes can VR bring to a coding environment? It would certainly be cool to fly around and observe a complicated network of code in action.
- KineticLensman 6y ago
  > spatial, visual, and tactile senses What about our olfactory senses, for code smells?
  - DonHopkins 6y ago
    iSmell! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17476460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17476460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24853659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24853659 >Losing your sense of smell and taste is a symptom of COVID-19! >Too bad the iSmell never took off and became ubiquitous, or it could be used to screen for COVID-19 symptoms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISmell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISmell https://www.wired.com/1999/11/digiscent/ https://www.wired.com/1999/11/digiscent/
- jmiskovic 6y ago
  You are designing language from scratch? Is it too early to show screenshot or a sketch? Often I get the urge to make spatial development environment, but I always envision it as lisp with 3D rendering/manipulation.
  - daenz 6y ago
    The language from scratch, yeah. I have experience with UE4, so I'm going to be using that. Too early for screenshots, I'm still in the planning phase. Basically I'm spending my time on a whiteboard thinking up simple programs (fibonacci sequence, graph traversal, etc), then drawing them out how I imagine they could be represented in a 3d environment. From that, I am distilling ideas of how to represent data types and algorithms in a way that doesn't look like spaghetti.
cjfd 6y ago
I hope not. The 'advancement' from text editing to something else would in all likelihood not be an advancement at all but a retardation instead. There is a reason that the invention of writing is the basis of civilization. The only way for leaving text editing to be left behind is if all these big companies forbid ordinary users to do any programming besides a very dumbed-down/graphical version of it. I am sure they would very much like this but it would be a form of tyranny.
- Firadeoclus 6y ago
  "Plain text" writing using a "text editor", is much more limited in its expressiveness than writing on a piece of paper. There is no reason to believe that a character grid somehow is the pinnacle of programming.
jcelerier 6y ago
Think about it: why are you writing a textual comment right now and not sending a picture, video, sound clip of your message ? That would be much less "silent film"-ish, no ?
- ArnoVW 6y ago
  If you ask me : because I can "scan" in 10 seconds a page of different replies, something which would be impossible to do visually or aurally. This is why 10-minute videos of "how to" in programming always enrage me. Though of course it makes a lot of sense for visual tasks such as 3D animation.
- pavlov 6y ago
  Text is a good medium for communicating stories and ideas, but software systems are primarily models. Other engineering professions make heavy use of visual modeling tools. Oddly, the industry that builds these tools is itself "the barefoot shoemaker."
  - otabdeveloper4 6y ago
    No, software isn't models. Software is text written in a mathematical language. Doing a visual interpretation of math (or interpretative dance, or a song, etc) isn't going to end in anything useful.
    - pavlov 6y ago
      Individual programs are text, but useful software systems are models.
      - otabdeveloper4 6y ago
        Which means that software documentation should use spatial visualization tricks, not the coding process. Which is what we kind of have now, except that really nobody wants to use software documentation.
    - 6y ago

Does anyone feel we are still in the silent film era of computer programming? Will we ever advance from text editors into something else and leave Vim, Emacs etc. forever behind for good?

kens 6y ago

The 80-column IBM punch card was invented in 1928 and here we are almost 100 years later writing programs as a sequence of 80-column lines of text. It seems pretty obvious to me that we're stuck in a local maximum. I don't think visual programming is the solution but there must be another alternative. Sort of like how databases are based on text but are much more than text.

DonHopkins 6y ago
What we don't need are 160-column punched cards. The proper response to "640K ought to be enough for anybody" is virtual memory, not 1280K. People used to complain about Macromedia Director only having 24 layers, so they increased it to 48. But then what are you supposed to do if you want to make a map of the United States: leave out Alaska and Hawaii?

daenz 6y ago

I do! I am currently in the very early stages of creating a VR-based language. I believe that if we can represent programs more intuitively to our spatial, visual, and tactile senses, we can unlock more programming potential in more people.

hour_glass 6y ago
Awesome, what changes can VR bring to a coding environment? It would certainly be cool to fly around and observe a complicated network of code in action.
KineticLensman 6y ago
> spatial, visual, and tactile senses What about our olfactory senses, for code smells?
- DonHopkins 6y ago
  iSmell! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17476460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17476460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24853659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24853659 >Losing your sense of smell and taste is a symptom of COVID-19! >Too bad the iSmell never took off and became ubiquitous, or it could be used to screen for COVID-19 symptoms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISmell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISmell https://www.wired.com/1999/11/digiscent/ https://www.wired.com/1999/11/digiscent/
jmiskovic 6y ago
You are designing language from scratch? Is it too early to show screenshot or a sketch? Often I get the urge to make spatial development environment, but I always envision it as lisp with 3D rendering/manipulation.
- daenz 6y ago
  The language from scratch, yeah. I have experience with UE4, so I'm going to be using that. Too early for screenshots, I'm still in the planning phase. Basically I'm spending my time on a whiteboard thinking up simple programs (fibonacci sequence, graph traversal, etc), then drawing them out how I imagine they could be represented in a 3d environment. From that, I am distilling ideas of how to represent data types and algorithms in a way that doesn't look like spaghetti.

cjfd 6y ago

I hope not. The 'advancement' from text editing to something else would in all likelihood not be an advancement at all but a retardation instead. There is a reason that the invention of writing is the basis of civilization. The only way for leaving text editing to be left behind is if all these big companies forbid ordinary users to do any programming besides a very dumbed-down/graphical version of it. I am sure they would very much like this but it would be a form of tyranny.

Firadeoclus 6y ago
"Plain text" writing using a "text editor", is much more limited in its expressiveness than writing on a piece of paper. There is no reason to believe that a character grid somehow is the pinnacle of programming.

jcelerier 6y ago

Think about it: why are you writing a textual comment right now and not sending a picture, video, sound clip of your message ? That would be much less "silent film"-ish, no ?

ArnoVW 6y ago
If you ask me : because I can "scan" in 10 seconds a page of different replies, something which would be impossible to do visually or aurally. This is why 10-minute videos of "how to" in programming always enrage me. Though of course it makes a lot of sense for visual tasks such as 3D animation.
pavlov 6y ago
Text is a good medium for communicating stories and ideas, but software systems are primarily models. Other engineering professions make heavy use of visual modeling tools. Oddly, the industry that builds these tools is itself "the barefoot shoemaker."
- otabdeveloper4 6y ago
  No, software isn't models. Software is text written in a mathematical language. Doing a visual interpretation of math (or interpretative dance, or a song, etc) isn't going to end in anything useful.
  - pavlov 6y ago
    Individual programs are text, but useful software systems are models.
    - otabdeveloper4 6y ago
      Which means that software documentation should use spatial visualization tricks, not the coding process. Which is what we kind of have now, except that really nobody wants to use software documentation.
  - 6y ago