3 ms·

> People are still typing the same Unix commands into 25x80 terminal windows. People are still using vi to edit programs as sequential lines of text in files us

> People are still typing the same Unix commands into 25x80 terminal windows. People are still using vi to edit programs as sequential lines of text in files using languages from the 80s (C++) or 90s (Java). This seems like an almost willful misunderstanding of what programming is. The power of programs does NOT come from their syntactic structure. The power of programs comes from the non-linearity of programming language semantics -- I can trivially write a program that (theoretically) calculates a number too large to represent in the number of atoms in the universe. The command line amplifies (non-linearly) what you can conventionally do with simple UIs. As a trivial example: $ mkdir -p src/{main,test}/{scala,java,resources} $ touch src/{main,test}/{scala,java,resources}/.keep I've just created 2*3 directories and files with two commands which were very quick to type out. I haven't done actual tests, but I'd argue that that was pretty quick compared to doing it in a GUI (for instance).

Roboprog 13y ago
One of my favorite CS professors back in the 80s used to joke that we had gone from cave paintings to written language, and now we wanted to back with our computers. (my paraphrase of whatever he actually said back then) Pictographs work for the illiterate, but that doesn't make them the most efficient interchange mechanism.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  A professor I knew had a good way to put it: "With the shell, you have a language. With pointy-clicky, you're reduced to pointing at things and grunting." While I enjoy the shallow dig, I think this is a pretty great metaphor generally, in a deep (and less condescending) way. If you drop me in France, and I don't speak French, I'll probably do a lot of communication with pointing and grunting, and I'll probably be able to accomplish simple tasks (particularly with an ideographic picture book on hand). Expressing more complicated things that way is pretty intractable, however. Learning to speak French is the solution, but it's a lot of work. Moreover, there are certainly contexts where pointing makes more sense ("I'll take that one, that one, and that one" versus trying to pick out differentiating features or count).
- cma 13y ago
  Most technical academic textbooks are full of pictures, diagrams, and graphs.

Roboprog 13y ago

One of my favorite CS professors back in the 80s used to joke that we had gone from cave paintings to written language, and now we wanted to back with our computers. (my paraphrase of whatever he actually said back then) Pictographs work for the illiterate, but that doesn't make them the most efficient interchange mechanism.

dllthomas 13y ago
A professor I knew had a good way to put it: "With the shell, you have a language. With pointy-clicky, you're reduced to pointing at things and grunting." While I enjoy the shallow dig, I think this is a pretty great metaphor generally, in a deep (and less condescending) way. If you drop me in France, and I don't speak French, I'll probably do a lot of communication with pointing and grunting, and I'll probably be able to accomplish simple tasks (particularly with an ideographic picture book on hand). Expressing more complicated things that way is pretty intractable, however. Learning to speak French is the solution, but it's a lot of work. Moreover, there are certainly contexts where pointing makes more sense ("I'll take that one, that one, and that one" versus trying to pick out differentiating features or count).
cma 13y ago
Most technical academic textbooks are full of pictures, diagrams, and graphs.