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I'm with you up to that last paragraph, and wonder if I would agree with you more there if you explained what you mean by "powered by the written word."

cxr 5y ago
Okay. First, the establishing shot: Literate programming envisions programs as texts meant to be read in the same vein as other texts like, say, a book of historical non-fiction or long-from narrative journalism. It goes without saying, but the written word is the basis for any work in this form. Second establishing shot: Self and Smalltalk are notoriously image-based systems. You grab hold of objects and then configure them, relying on point-and-click for much of it. Some aspects of these systems will by their nature be exposed in part as text, e.g. textual representation of methods, but you're still interacting with live objects. I'll assume that you're familiar with this, but for completeness including for the benefit of those who aren't, consider the way the way the CSS style sidebar in your favorite browser's Web developer tools work. Only now imagine that instead of just using it for debugging and tweaks, suppose when you needed to make a permanent edit to the style sheet on your homepage, you opened up the CSS viewer, made the edit, and the result persists—not just in your browser, but by changing the very style sheet itself. Here's David Ungar on this experience (around 1 hour in): > I try to explain to people that the notion of compiler is broken. Of course I learned this from Smalltalk, but what we want to build is experiences—artificial realities that convince you that your source code is real. It's directly executed. There's no lag between editing and running[...] The environment stresses things in your program, not tools—which is another rant I have. It's this whole idea that we want to put you in an artificial reality—I got that from Randy [Smith]—in which it's easy and natural and low-cognitive-burden to get the computer to do what you want it to do, rather than running language translators that turn weird strings of text into bits the machine can run <https://vimeo.com/594563690 https://vimeo.com/594563690> Now I want to attack the traditional experience by doing the opposite and leaning in on the text part. The point-and-click part of object configuration in Self and Smalltalk is not readily reproducible (hence the proliferation of image-based designs for runtime implementations), and texts deliberately designed for consumption are pretty robust as far as transmission goes with respect to both physical transmission as well as a matter of transmission of knowledge—one of the best ways to "get up to speed" on something is to have someone just tell you about it. A good LP system would work the way Self and Smalltalk do, but with the point-and-click eliminated. Interactive object configuration should be replaced by written exposition. Despite mainstream programming being overwhelmingly text-based, none of them really work this way. (After all, if being text-based were sufficient, then there would be no meaningful difference between mainstream filed-and-compiled source code vs LP systems.) I suppose what I'm advocating for could be thought of as object-oriented literate programming, as treacherous and unfashionable as the term OO is. Neither REPLs nor notebooks really capture this in the right way, being rooted still too far away from LP and and more akin to traditional programming, but it's a start. I'm sure that interactive fiction could contribute something here, but with the open sourcing of Inform7 being two years overdue (and itself being implemented in C++), there's a dearth widely available prior art.

cxr 5y ago

Okay. First, the establishing shot: Literate programming envisions programs as texts meant to be read in the same vein as other texts like, say, a book of historical non-fiction or long-from narrative journalism. It goes without saying, but the written word is the basis for any work in this form. Second establishing shot: Self and Smalltalk are notoriously image-based systems. You grab hold of objects and then configure them, relying on point-and-click for much of it. Some aspects of these systems will by their nature be exposed in part as text, e.g. textual representation of methods, but you're still interacting with live objects. I'll assume that you're familiar with this, but for completeness including for the benefit of those who aren't, consider the way the way the CSS style sidebar in your favorite browser's Web developer tools work. Only now imagine that instead of just using it for debugging and tweaks, suppose when you needed to make a permanent edit to the style sheet on your homepage, you opened up the CSS viewer, made the edit, and the result persists—not just in your browser, but by changing the very style sheet itself. Here's David Ungar on this experience (around 1 hour in): > I try to explain to people that the notion of compiler is broken. Of course I learned this from Smalltalk, but what we want to build is experiences—artificial realities that convince you that your source code is real. It's directly executed. There's no lag between editing and running[...] The environment stresses things in your program, not tools—which is another rant I have. It's this whole idea that we want to put you in an artificial reality—I got that from Randy [Smith]—in which it's easy and natural and low-cognitive-burden to get the computer to do what you want it to do, rather than running language translators that turn weird strings of text into bits the machine can run <https://vimeo.com/594563690 https://vimeo.com/594563690> Now I want to attack the traditional experience by doing the opposite and leaning in on the text part. The point-and-click part of object configuration in Self and Smalltalk is not readily reproducible (hence the proliferation of image-based designs for runtime implementations), and texts deliberately designed for consumption are pretty robust as far as transmission goes with respect to both physical transmission as well as a matter of transmission of knowledge—one of the best ways to "get up to speed" on something is to have someone just tell you about it. A good LP system would work the way Self and Smalltalk do, but with the point-and-click eliminated. Interactive object configuration should be replaced by written exposition. Despite mainstream programming being overwhelmingly text-based, none of them really work this way. (After all, if being text-based were sufficient, then there would be no meaningful difference between mainstream filed-and-compiled source code vs LP systems.) I suppose what I'm advocating for could be thought of as object-oriented literate programming, as treacherous and unfashionable as the term OO is. Neither REPLs nor notebooks really capture this in the right way, being rooted still too far away from LP and and more akin to traditional programming, but it's a start. I'm sure that interactive fiction could contribute something here, but with the open sourcing of Inform7 being two years overdue (and itself being implemented in C++), there's a dearth widely available prior art.