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if you're interested in visual programming environments and try to look up prior efforts at all, you WILL find this sentiment to be true. It's somewhat depressi
by vinodkd 14y ago
if you're interested in visual programming environments and try to look up prior efforts at all, you WILL find this sentiment to be true. It's somewhat depressing actually. You'll not just find all these cool sounding environments from the 80s that seemed light years ahead of today (or even something like Light Table), but you'll also find studies on the difficulties people faced with them and why they failed.
Text is not an easy thing to dislodge from the programmer's toolset.
My personal opinion keeps switching between "Text is basic and elemental, so it's the most natural way to represent code and therefore is the preferred" and "We havent built tools good enough or representations revolutionary enough (or scalable enough) and that's why text remains preferred".
I can see how someone who's built a non-textual programming environment can come to a "been there, done that" kind of attitude. Just take his enthusiasm at new attempts at the problem as a more pertinent response and ignore the rest.
- silentbicycle 14y agoAnother example: APL used a bunch of mnemonic symbols for operators -- for example, the "reverse" operator is a circle with a vertical line through it. Mirror image. This made sense back in 1962, with Mad Men-era Selectric typewriters* , but it never sat comfortably with ASCII. Very dense, expressive code. Like thinking in kanji, after a lifetime of alphabetic hackery. * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectric http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectric The idea has many things going for it, and is worth another go in the era of touchpads and graphic interfaces. APL has always had a die-hard following, and intriguing ASCII offshoots such as J and K, but it's time for a second chance. The APLs have many other interesting aspects (they're all about data-parallelism and functional programming of a different flavor than Lisp and Haskell), but to my knowledge nobody has sincerely retried the glyph-based language thing again.