4 ms·
In other words, text should be a projective UX for modifying an underlying graphical model; not a canonical storage format for code.
by derefr 4y ago
In other words, text should be a projective UX for modifying an underlying graphical model; not a canonical storage format for code.
- solarkraft 4y agoI'd go exactly the other way around since every programming tool under the sun already knows how to deal with text. Graphs as a projective UX for an underlying textual model sounds a bit more ... realistic. All those "graph programming" languages don't really seem practical for real projects precisely due to the lack of an ecosystem around them.
- derefr 4y agoThe problem is that there's always a valid textual projection for any graph, but there isn't always a valid graphical projection for any text. Think like: your syntax highlighter has no idea what your code when you're in the middle of typing, because once you type an opening parenthesis without yet having typed a closing one, your code no longer has any possible valid parse. Ideally, you shouldn't be able to modify the text in ways that don't represent an atomic graphical operation in the first place. But if you enforce that, you can't really say that the textual representation is the canonical one. It's just a storage projection.