4 ms·

I think the core thought in "But Why" kind of gives away the problem this will face. The idea is that you will lose time as you "move between valid programs."

by taeric 3y ago

I think the core thought in "But Why" kind of gives away the problem this will face. The idea is that you will lose time as you "move between valid programs." A problem, though, is most "valid programs" are still not valid solutions to what you are working on. Consider, most of us work in rather phonetic languages as we type day to day. Surely it would be easier if we worked instead in languages where you did not have to do this. Let me type only valid sentences as I move from thought to thought. Surely that would be better? Why, then, do we not do that? Of course, I don't know why. I suspect there is a good deal to inertia style thoughts that explains this. But it is a good hint that the idea that you can break apart from symbols that need more symbols for context to build meaning is not one that really anything has fully converged to.

silon42 3y ago
I always think of this when I edit python and my code is indented wrong... not a fan by structuring by indentation, but it doesn't seem to be a problem for most people.
- taeric 3y ago
  Cards on the table, I'm a lisp fan, so I'm probably the closest you can get to directly editing an AST for my dream program. I /like/ the idea of it. I just don't think it is a holy grail endpoint of program editing. Oddly, I do think there is something to making sure all of your data has a literal representation in the code, if you can. Such that I do think being able to directly interact with data is huge. I also love when you can symbolically work with programs. But, yeah, the overwhelming evidence is that this just isn't necessary for things. Both in communication, and in program specification.
conartist6 3y ago
I think you're thinking about it subtly wrong. A properly built semantic editor won't force you to move between valid programs in that sense. It will be comfortable decomposing programs into fragments. For example if I decompose the sentence "I press play" into words devoid of context, "I" still pretty much means what it did but "press" could now as easily mean pressing shirts or pressing an advantage, and "play" could be what children do, not the implied "play button". A good semantic editor for that sentence would allow me to detach the word "play" without losing the context that the meaning is "play button". Similarly a good semantic code editor would let me do something like pull two non-adjacent class methods out of a class and into a clipboard, then drop them into another class. If you did this this with text, the editor would not understand the clipboard content as class methods are (usually) not parseable outside a class.
- taeric 3y ago
  Symbols are not context free, though. And words being compound symbols means they are heavily dependent on context. Pretty much period. You can argue that I should be able to copy a method invocation and move it, but I confess I don't even really understand what that would mean or how it would help me. More, you are fixed in a global evaluation sense of the work, now. What if I want to take a formula in code, evaluate its derivative, and then use that for evaluating input? (That is, the exact same code depends on where it is But, again, my point was not that we can find the reason it doesn't work. I don't know the reason it doesn't work. I don't even know for sure that it can't work. What I do know is that no other communication has distilled to this level of editing. Happy to be proven wrong. I had meant to edit my post to refer to this all as "a" problem that this idea will face. Specifically that no other editing of anything that I am aware of happens at this level. There are some neat composition tools that can put together some scenes in this way, I think. Such that maybe there is more of a generalization there than I think there is. Seems very unlikely, though. Now, oddly, I do think software is best made to enable this style of construction for what it controls. Easy example would be a level editor in a video game. That makes surprisingly little sense to do in a symbol based editor, as opposed to a palette based visual editor. Such that I think I'm open to the idea, at some level. Symbol manipulation is just not that level, for most things.

by taeric 3y ago

silon42 3y ago

I always think of this when I edit python and my code is indented wrong... not a fan by structuring by indentation, but it doesn't seem to be a problem for most people.

taeric 3y ago
Cards on the table, I'm a lisp fan, so I'm probably the closest you can get to directly editing an AST for my dream program. I /like/ the idea of it. I just don't think it is a holy grail endpoint of program editing. Oddly, I do think there is something to making sure all of your data has a literal representation in the code, if you can. Such that I do think being able to directly interact with data is huge. I also love when you can symbolically work with programs. But, yeah, the overwhelming evidence is that this just isn't necessary for things. Both in communication, and in program specification.

conartist6 3y ago

I think you're thinking about it subtly wrong. A properly built semantic editor won't force you to move between valid programs in that sense. It will be comfortable decomposing programs into fragments. For example if I decompose the sentence "I press play" into words devoid of context, "I" still pretty much means what it did but "press" could now as easily mean pressing shirts or pressing an advantage, and "play" could be what children do, not the implied "play button". A good semantic editor for that sentence would allow me to detach the word "play" without losing the context that the meaning is "play button". Similarly a good semantic code editor would let me do something like pull two non-adjacent class methods out of a class and into a clipboard, then drop them into another class. If you did this this with text, the editor would not understand the clipboard content as class methods are (usually) not parseable outside a class.

taeric 3y ago
Symbols are not context free, though. And words being compound symbols means they are heavily dependent on context. Pretty much period. You can argue that I should be able to copy a method invocation and move it, but I confess I don't even really understand what that would mean or how it would help me. More, you are fixed in a global evaluation sense of the work, now. What if I want to take a formula in code, evaluate its derivative, and then use that for evaluating input? (That is, the exact same code depends on where it is But, again, my point was not that we can find the reason it doesn't work. I don't know the reason it doesn't work. I don't even know for sure that it can't work. What I do know is that no other communication has distilled to this level of editing. Happy to be proven wrong. I had meant to edit my post to refer to this all as "a" problem that this idea will face. Specifically that no other editing of anything that I am aware of happens at this level. There are some neat composition tools that can put together some scenes in this way, I think. Such that maybe there is more of a generalization there than I think there is. Seems very unlikely, though. Now, oddly, I do think software is best made to enable this style of construction for what it controls. Easy example would be a level editor in a video game. That makes surprisingly little sense to do in a symbol based editor, as opposed to a palette based visual editor. Such that I think I'm open to the idea, at some level. Symbol manipulation is just not that level, for most things.