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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 f

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.
  - IOT_Apprentice 6y ago
    Software is currently described by written text that is transformed by other process (compilers/interpreters) to a different state and then executed. Often the execution does not work as expected due to undefined conditions or states within the "mathematical language", or misunderstanding of the scope or memory allocation or release, etc. There certainly could and should be visual representations of state, memory utilization, registers, variable values and execution sequence based on the textual conditions described. Contrasts of expected execution vs actual. Perhaps using GPT-3 that is taught each programming language and then a designer can specify the behavior and GPT-X* can build a solution that can be formally verified as provable. Then generate test cases and show the flow and proof of correct execution based on test conditions.
    - jcelerier 6y ago
      > Often the execution does not work as expected due to undefined conditions or states within the "mathematical language", or misunderstanding of the scope or memory allocation or release, etc. nah, 90%+ of bugs are already present in the "paper" specification in my experience, without any programming language involved (and I'm mostly writing in C++ which is prone to the issues you mention).
IOT_Apprentice 6y ago
Like TikTok?

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.
- IOT_Apprentice 6y ago
  Software is currently described by written text that is transformed by other process (compilers/interpreters) to a different state and then executed. Often the execution does not work as expected due to undefined conditions or states within the "mathematical language", or misunderstanding of the scope or memory allocation or release, etc. There certainly could and should be visual representations of state, memory utilization, registers, variable values and execution sequence based on the textual conditions described. Contrasts of expected execution vs actual. Perhaps using GPT-3 that is taught each programming language and then a designer can specify the behavior and GPT-X* can build a solution that can be formally verified as provable. Then generate test cases and show the flow and proof of correct execution based on test conditions.
  - jcelerier 6y ago
    > Often the execution does not work as expected due to undefined conditions or states within the "mathematical language", or misunderstanding of the scope or memory allocation or release, etc. nah, 90%+ of bugs are already present in the "paper" specification in my experience, without any programming language involved (and I'm mostly writing in C++ which is prone to the issues you mention).

IOT_Apprentice 6y ago

Like TikTok?