5 ms·

Haven't people been communicating information to other people as text for thousands of years? I'm not so convinced that there's a universally better mechanism f

Haven't people been communicating information to other people as text for thousands of years? I'm not so convinced that there's a universally better mechanism for communicating with machines.

NoodleIncident 13y ago
Yes. This is what I always think when people criticize text-based programming languages. People also point and gesture and use body language to communicate. Both can be done at once, and you can communicate without using a single spoken or written word.
Millennium 13y ago
Text isn't as important as language itself, but there's the rub: no one has yet devised a better way to program computers than language. Even the so-called "visual environments" we see today ultimately boil down to recognizable linguistic concepts: they do it by arranging shapes in space rather than writing text, but you can pick out the same nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech. And that's the problem. Visual environments are trying to represent language, and they're just not as good at it as text, which is the closest thing to a native format yet devised for the stuff. Eventually the inefficiencies start to get annoying, people go for the greater efficiency of text, and the visual environment languishes. The bottom line is that visual environments will never be as good as text for representing programming languages. Rather than trying to do language better than text, they need to find a paradigm that's better than language, and implement that. I don't have any clue what something like that would even look like; to be honest, I'm not sure it can even be done. But the greatest victories against the most hopeless-seeming odds are won by changing the whole nature of the fight, and that's what visual programming is going to have to do.
- nzp 13y ago
  Finding a paradigm better than language, i.e. an abstract symbolic system, would be a such a revolutionary turning point in the ... um, everything that I think programming would at that point seem just silly. What would that even mean? We would become some sort of gods. Mathematics as we know it would certainly become irrelevant. I'm not sure this is even science fiction.
- andrewflnr 13y ago
  What, precisely, do you mean by language? Machine language doesn't exactly have grammar the same way that human language does, and I can't interpret a concatenative language that way either (which is much higher level). We're not going to get away from the idea of a linear sequence of bits/symbols, but beyond that almost anything goes, and indeed probably has gone.
gress 13y ago
Or it could be that it will take another thousand years for us to develop a good language for the new medium. Text took a long time to figure out.
davidad_ 13y ago
This is a fair point which deserves a response. Before text was invented, people communicated using spoken language. Text was a major breakthrough because once some communication was written, it became a physical object which could be stored in libraries, carried by sea or horseback, and read by more than one person. However, it was a compromise: you could no longer interact with the reader. As a result, most people prefer to communicate interactively. Even people who cannot speak use sign language instead of resorting to text. What we are doing right now is a hybrid of textual and interactive communication; we're taking turns writing chunks of text. In the programming world, this is roughly equivalent to a REPL. But actually developing software using a REPL is still quite uncommon; I think it's reserved mostly for Emacs Lisp hackers. We're doing this instead of communicating by audio partly to create a public indexable record of our correspondence, partly to protect our privacy, partly for synchronization reasons, and partly due to arbitrary norms and the information systems that co-evolved with them; but mostly to save ourselves from mentally keeping track of the edits we make to our expressions before committing them ("scratch that...what I meant to say is.."). When the target of one's communication is a machine with a visual display, that latter concern completely evaporates. Naturally, the screen editor (introduced in 1961 as Expensive Typewriter for the PDP-1 and pretty well refined by the NLS era) implements this suggestion thoroughly. Yet, generally, the screen editor is used only to edit pieces of text, which are then separately turned into programs. What I'm proposing is nothing more outrageous than a screen editor which edits programs directly instead of textual representations thereof.
agumonkey 13y ago
I was just reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail#History earlier. Interesting how they recycled resources (pool of fresh horses) on a network of relay.

Haven't people been communicating information to other people as text for thousands of years? I'm not so convinced that there's a universally better mechanism for communicating with machines.

NoodleIncident 13y ago

Yes. This is what I always think when people criticize text-based programming languages. People also point and gesture and use body language to communicate. Both can be done at once, and you can communicate without using a single spoken or written word.

Millennium 13y ago

Text isn't as important as language itself, but there's the rub: no one has yet devised a better way to program computers than language. Even the so-called "visual environments" we see today ultimately boil down to recognizable linguistic concepts: they do it by arranging shapes in space rather than writing text, but you can pick out the same nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech. And that's the problem. Visual environments are trying to represent language, and they're just not as good at it as text, which is the closest thing to a native format yet devised for the stuff. Eventually the inefficiencies start to get annoying, people go for the greater efficiency of text, and the visual environment languishes. The bottom line is that visual environments will never be as good as text for representing programming languages. Rather than trying to do language better than text, they need to find a paradigm that's better than language, and implement that. I don't have any clue what something like that would even look like; to be honest, I'm not sure it can even be done. But the greatest victories against the most hopeless-seeming odds are won by changing the whole nature of the fight, and that's what visual programming is going to have to do.

nzp 13y ago
Finding a paradigm better than language, i.e. an abstract symbolic system, would be a such a revolutionary turning point in the ... um, everything that I think programming would at that point seem just silly. What would that even mean? We would become some sort of gods. Mathematics as we know it would certainly become irrelevant. I'm not sure this is even science fiction.
andrewflnr 13y ago
What, precisely, do you mean by language? Machine language doesn't exactly have grammar the same way that human language does, and I can't interpret a concatenative language that way either (which is much higher level). We're not going to get away from the idea of a linear sequence of bits/symbols, but beyond that almost anything goes, and indeed probably has gone.

gress 13y ago

Or it could be that it will take another thousand years for us to develop a good language for the new medium. Text took a long time to figure out.

davidad_ 13y ago

This is a fair point which deserves a response. Before text was invented, people communicated using spoken language. Text was a major breakthrough because once some communication was written, it became a physical object which could be stored in libraries, carried by sea or horseback, and read by more than one person. However, it was a compromise: you could no longer interact with the reader. As a result, most people prefer to communicate interactively. Even people who cannot speak use sign language instead of resorting to text. What we are doing right now is a hybrid of textual and interactive communication; we're taking turns writing chunks of text. In the programming world, this is roughly equivalent to a REPL. But actually developing software using a REPL is still quite uncommon; I think it's reserved mostly for Emacs Lisp hackers. We're doing this instead of communicating by audio partly to create a public indexable record of our correspondence, partly to protect our privacy, partly for synchronization reasons, and partly due to arbitrary norms and the information systems that co-evolved with them; but mostly to save ourselves from mentally keeping track of the edits we make to our expressions before committing them ("scratch that...what I meant to say is.."). When the target of one's communication is a machine with a visual display, that latter concern completely evaporates. Naturally, the screen editor (introduced in 1961 as Expensive Typewriter for the PDP-1 and pretty well refined by the NLS era) implements this suggestion thoroughly. Yet, generally, the screen editor is used only to edit pieces of text, which are then separately turned into programs. What I'm proposing is nothing more outrageous than a screen editor which edits programs directly instead of textual representations thereof.

agumonkey 13y ago

I was just reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail#History earlier. Interesting how they recycled resources (pool of fresh horses) on a network of relay.