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"Even if you’re designing for professional programmers, in the end your programming language is basically a user-interface design. You will get much better resu
by samatman 4y ago
"Even if you’re designing for professional programmers, in the end your programming language is basically a user-interface design. You will get much better results regardless of what you’re trying to do if you think of it as a user-interface design." -Alan Kay
https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~susan/475/AlanKay.html https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~susan/475/AlanKay.html
- igouy 4y agoLet's take that to be true, as-before — Perhaps "to serve the creative spirit" of the coder is not what most software development should be about. Perhaps most software development should be about effectiveness or reliability or …
- roeles 4y agoIn the words of Christopher Alexander, the programmer is the true inhabiter of the program. Since we can expect the world in which the program should function will change, so should the program. It is the programmer that has to figure out, often with experiments, what changes to the program work best. Therefore it makes no sense to me to focus on anything but serving the programmer.
- samatman 4y agoThe better the experience is for the programmer, the more users will say "y'know what? This doesn't quite do what I want, I wonder how I change that" and presto, they're a programmer now. We would never have had Hypercard if it weren't for Smalltalk and Alan Kay, and we've never had a platform as good as Hypercard since. That's a crying shame.
- igouy 4y agoWho does the programmer "serve" ?