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So what happens when you have a 10 deep nested if tree? Your answer would be to not do it because it doesn't fit nicely in a 2d page. My answer would be to put

So what happens when you have a 10 deep nested if tree? Your answer would be to not do it because it doesn't fit nicely in a 2d page. My answer would be to put it in a 1d line and not bake semantics into presentation. But you can't pretend that the space of programs isn't infinite dimensional when the space we work in is only 3d. Regardless of how clever you are using a medium with a dimensionality higher than 1 for semantics will always result in expressions you can't express. This is why we've stuck with text. It's 1d, but we can make it 2d to help understand what is going on visually in the simple cases humans can understand intuitively. Yet it is complex enough to represent any possible object.

unixbane 4y ago
Just switch back and forth between box representation and graph. It's still far better than text. Text fails far faster. Have you ever used IDA? It shows a graph view of assembly based on jump flow instead of a linear assembly listing. Of course you can't magically understand all programs just with a simple algorithm to format them a certain way, but it's still immediately obvious that this is better. Most code is immediately understandable just using a C#/Java decompiler or gofmt without the programmer needing to format it. I just see variable names and formatting as spam and red herrings. Anyway you can't audit code by taking the programmer's word that he formatted it a certain way, so this whole "text for writing a poem of comprehension" idea is moot and outdated at least 30 years ago anyway.