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The author never explains why all these features are desirable. Safe object traversal? Sure, reflection is a pain, but how would an improvement in this area br

by et1337 13y ago

The author never explains why all these features are desirable. Safe object traversal? Sure, reflection is a pain, but how would an improvement in this area bring us into the "future"? Also, I may have misunderstood, but isn't Lisp's object traversal about as safe as you can get? More/better ASTs? I think he was trying to say "compilers should have APIs for third-party tools". Otherwise I don't see why it matters whether the compiler builds an AST or not. "Direct manipulation of data" as coding? First of all, what does this even mean, and how is it better than the current standard of ASCII files? The author dismisses graphical programming languages as being too heavily focused on "symbolic manipulation". I'm guessing he's talking about LabVIEW, which is admittedly horrendous. But there are others. Blender's node-based shader system[1] fulfills many of these seemingly arbitrary wish-list items. It's easily accessible via Blender's Python API, it has a clearly visible AST, it's deterministic and massively parallel... In short, I'm confused and unconvinced that the future envisioned in this article is better than what we have now. [1] http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-242/blender-material-nodes/ http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-242/...

ianbicking 13y ago
Safe object traversal: if you can traverse objects you can start to create search algorithms (which is what Prolog's solver really is) that work across different domains and objects. I think this is a path towards goal-oriented programming. ASTs: by representing the program in a more abstracted way, we can start to build tools that manipulate them in ways other than ASCII editors. Direct manipulation of data: well, Bret brought this one up, not me. I thought it was a little odd. While spatial representation of code was about stretching our ASCII into something else, I chose to interpret this as stretching our concrete editing tools towards code. In other words, how do you add abstractions to concrete editing tools. I think the simplest task would be the one to start with: how do you parametrize something in a concrete data editor?
- lmm 13y ago
  A modern IDE already knows the AST it's working with in intimate detail - it has to, so that it can refactor it. But it's still displayed as (mostly) plain text, because that's still the best format for humans to read code (or indeed anything else) in.

by et1337 13y ago

ianbicking 13y ago

Safe object traversal: if you can traverse objects you can start to create search algorithms (which is what Prolog's solver really is) that work across different domains and objects. I think this is a path towards goal-oriented programming. ASTs: by representing the program in a more abstracted way, we can start to build tools that manipulate them in ways other than ASCII editors. Direct manipulation of data: well, Bret brought this one up, not me. I thought it was a little odd. While spatial representation of code was about stretching our ASCII into something else, I chose to interpret this as stretching our concrete editing tools towards code. In other words, how do you add abstractions to concrete editing tools. I think the simplest task would be the one to start with: how do you parametrize something in a concrete data editor?

lmm 13y ago
A modern IDE already knows the AST it's working with in intimate detail - it has to, so that it can refactor it. But it's still displayed as (mostly) plain text, because that's still the best format for humans to read code (or indeed anything else) in.