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There have been a thousand graduate school and commercial project to try to develop program representations and languages that were superior to the flat text fi

There have been a thousand graduate school and commercial project to try to develop program representations and languages that were superior to the flat text file. Obviously, none of them have received wide usage. What has succeeded for many is scriptable text editors, cscope-like tools, autocomplete-like features, and refactoring support in editors. But as you point out, these are better tools to work with program text. I think text is safe for the forseeable future. Partly because we have thousands of years experience with it and partly because it's a winning combination of a extremely powerful representation format and a KISS solution.

Chris_Newton 15y ago
I agree that, for better or worse, we'll be using text-based formats for a while. I don't think the hypothetical alternative representation I mentioned is going to happen off the back of a single grad school research project, or anything even close to that scale. It's more like something that's going to take the R&D lab of an industry heavweight a decade to develop and refine and then launch into widespread industrial usage with the backing of at least one major platform developer when it's ready for prime time. Sadly, as long as text-based (or, perhaps more accurately, line-based) programming languages are good enough to produce acceptable software, there isn't a truly compelling motivation to develop a completely new model. I wonder whether increasing pressure on the software industry to provide quality and security as a backlash against the current cheap-and-nasty trend will drive us toward more radical programming models first, and perhaps get us close enough to make the quantum leap to an entirely new kind of representation from there.
stcredzero 15y ago
There have been a thousand graduate school and commercial project to try to develop program representations and languages that were superior to the flat text file. Obviously, none of them have received wide usage. Chunk format Smalltalk change logs are a text file, but they're combined with a mechanism for treating code changes like db transaction logs, in a language with very little syntax, with very fine grained codebase change (method level, with generally small methods) built into the language and environment. It's also as rock solid as traditional flat text files, and even more robust in some regards. Code syntax which requires all information relevant in a class to be defined together interferes with a change log scheme. But such syntactic structures are helpful if dealing with code in traditional flat files. In a way, it's like an Evolutionary Stable Strategy. It's mostly a flat file world, so the languages are mostly implemented with that in mind. This general situation makes it almost impossible for anything else to develop its won ecosystem. I think forward progress will be made by leveraging "code folding" schemes. Eventually, this will amount to the same functionality people are aiming for then they discuss non-text representations.
- stcredzero 15y ago
  Arrgh: when, not then. Thanks again iPad!

There have been a thousand graduate school and commercial project to try to develop program representations and languages that were superior to the flat text file. Obviously, none of them have received wide usage. What has succeeded for many is scriptable text editors, cscope-like tools, autocomplete-like features, and refactoring support in editors. But as you point out, these are better tools to work with program text. I think text is safe for the forseeable future. Partly because we have thousands of years experience with it and partly because it's a winning combination of a extremely powerful representation format and a KISS solution.

Chris_Newton 15y ago

I agree that, for better or worse, we'll be using text-based formats for a while. I don't think the hypothetical alternative representation I mentioned is going to happen off the back of a single grad school research project, or anything even close to that scale. It's more like something that's going to take the R&D lab of an industry heavweight a decade to develop and refine and then launch into widespread industrial usage with the backing of at least one major platform developer when it's ready for prime time. Sadly, as long as text-based (or, perhaps more accurately, line-based) programming languages are good enough to produce acceptable software, there isn't a truly compelling motivation to develop a completely new model. I wonder whether increasing pressure on the software industry to provide quality and security as a backlash against the current cheap-and-nasty trend will drive us toward more radical programming models first, and perhaps get us close enough to make the quantum leap to an entirely new kind of representation from there.

stcredzero 15y ago

There have been a thousand graduate school and commercial project to try to develop program representations and languages that were superior to the flat text file. Obviously, none of them have received wide usage. Chunk format Smalltalk change logs are a text file, but they're combined with a mechanism for treating code changes like db transaction logs, in a language with very little syntax, with very fine grained codebase change (method level, with generally small methods) built into the language and environment. It's also as rock solid as traditional flat text files, and even more robust in some regards. Code syntax which requires all information relevant in a class to be defined together interferes with a change log scheme. But such syntactic structures are helpful if dealing with code in traditional flat files. In a way, it's like an Evolutionary Stable Strategy. It's mostly a flat file world, so the languages are mostly implemented with that in mind. This general situation makes it almost impossible for anything else to develop its won ecosystem. I think forward progress will be made by leveraging "code folding" schemes. Eventually, this will amount to the same functionality people are aiming for then they discuss non-text representations.

stcredzero 15y ago
Arrgh: when, not then. Thanks again iPad!