3 ms·

Illustrative Programming

19 points by mbrubeck 17y ago

mixmax 17y ago
Wouldn't the way to go be to have an illustrative IDE instead of an illustrative programming language? That way you would have the full power of the language, yet newbies would be able to get something done in it. For instance the flow of the program could consist of a number of boxes stacked on top of each other, illustrating the flow. Each box would have one or more lines showing the input and output, and when clicked it would open up showing either the boxes it contains (funtions, nethods, code snippets etc.) or the raw code if you're at the lowest level. You can click the boxes-within-boxes until you reach the raw code at the bottom. The user would be able to drag boxes into his program, from simple ones that just print something to the screen (Two lines: input text and output text) to complex methods and functions. The whole thing could probly be coded up in emacs. Note that this is just a wild idea, and there are probably tons of things I haven't thought of. It's pretty interesting though.
- akkartik 17y ago
  Check out subtext: http://www.subtextual.org/subtext2.html http://www.subtextual.org/subtext2.html
- gruseom 17y ago
  Boxes-and-lines programming has been tried many times. It's enticing because if you look at simple examples it seems like it ought to work. The problem is that when applied to programs of any complexity the visual format quickly becomes unwieldy. There's a reason why humans represent complex information textually.
  - mixmax 17y ago
    You're probably right.
- mbrubeck 17y ago
  Programmers who use the REPL heavily (especially in languages with good REPL support like Lisp, Python, Haskell) seem to get a lot of the benefits of "illustrative" programming, too.
gruseom 17y ago
The term "illustrative programming" seems a bit pretentious, plus misleadingly suggestive of visual programming. I agree that the spreadsheet is (1) a programming environment, and therefore (2) the most widely used programming environment. Has there been any other tool that put comparable programming power into the hands of non-programmers? One thing that distinguishes the spreadsheet, which Fowler sort of butts up against without mentioning, is that the user is never asked to formulate abstractions. Spreadsheet formulas always go hand-in-hand with concrete data, so the user can build a spreadsheet without ever having to think beyond their particular example. I think this is one of the keys to the spreadsheet's popularity. To put it another way, I think this is one of the things that makes most programming inaccessible to most people: they have a low tolerance for abstraction. If you asked a spreadsheet user to type in all the formulas before instantiating them with data (and there have been attempts to "improve" on spreadsheets which do just that), most users would recoil.

19 points by mbrubeck 17y ago

Wouldn't the way to go be to have an illustrative IDE instead of an illustrative programming language? That way you would have the full power of the language, yet newbies would be able to get something done in it. For instance the flow of the program could consist of a number of boxes stacked on top of each other, illustrating the flow. Each box would have one or more lines showing the input and output, and when clicked it would open up showing either the boxes it contains (funtions, nethods, code snippets etc.) or the raw code if you're at the lowest level. You can click the boxes-within-boxes until you reach the raw code at the bottom. The user would be able to drag boxes into his program, from simple ones that just print something to the screen (Two lines: input text and output text) to complex methods and functions. The whole thing could probly be coded up in emacs. Note that this is just a wild idea, and there are probably tons of things I haven't thought of. It's pretty interesting though.

akkartik 17y ago
Check out subtext: http://www.subtextual.org/subtext2.html http://www.subtextual.org/subtext2.html
gruseom 17y ago
Boxes-and-lines programming has been tried many times. It's enticing because if you look at simple examples it seems like it ought to work. The problem is that when applied to programs of any complexity the visual format quickly becomes unwieldy. There's a reason why humans represent complex information textually.
- mixmax 17y ago
  You're probably right.
mbrubeck 17y ago
Programmers who use the REPL heavily (especially in languages with good REPL support like Lisp, Python, Haskell) seem to get a lot of the benefits of "illustrative" programming, too.

gruseom 17y ago

The term "illustrative programming" seems a bit pretentious, plus misleadingly suggestive of visual programming. I agree that the spreadsheet is (1) a programming environment, and therefore (2) the most widely used programming environment. Has there been any other tool that put comparable programming power into the hands of non-programmers? One thing that distinguishes the spreadsheet, which Fowler sort of butts up against without mentioning, is that the user is never asked to formulate abstractions. Spreadsheet formulas always go hand-in-hand with concrete data, so the user can build a spreadsheet without ever having to think beyond their particular example. I think this is one of the keys to the spreadsheet's popularity. To put it another way, I think this is one of the things that makes most programming inaccessible to most people: they have a low tolerance for abstraction. If you asked a spreadsheet user to type in all the formulas before instantiating them with data (and there have been attempts to "improve" on spreadsheets which do just that), most users would recoil.