4 ms·

You're right, I think the author has a point but putting it all under the umbrella of "WYSIWYG" is not helping it. For instance, I agree that the current mostl

by simias 12y ago

You're right, I think the author has a point but putting it all under the umbrella of "WYSIWYG" is not helping it. For instance, I agree that the current mostly text-based interface to programming could be improved dramatically by abstracting ourselves away from the source files towards a more visual representation of the code, showing dependencies between functions etc... Syntax highlighting doesn't quite cut it. I wouldn't call that "WYSIWYG" at all though. In essence most source code is a graph of function calls and it's very hard to represent that in plain text. There have been some efforts in that direction (lately I remember the light table editor for instance) but at the end of the day I'm still editing ASCII files in emacs... What we need isn't WYSIWYG, it's better visual representation of the data we're manipulating.

markrages 12y ago
I notice your response was in the form of a few paragraphs of text, rather than a photo or diagram. Most conversation are "text-based". Our human brains have hardware acceleration for text processing and we're quite good at it. Since programming environments exist to make the best impedance match between programmer and machine, they use text. Language uses incredible composability to encode great complexity. Flowcharts are one implementation of what you propose. Or LabView: http://www.ni.com/cms/images/devzone/pub/nrjsxmfm912163998723206173.jpg http://www.ni.com/cms/images/devzone/pub/nrjsxmfm91216399872...
- TuringTest 12y ago
  Our human brains have hardware acceleration for image processing as well. Limiting ourselves to text is wasting half our natural resources. Flowcharts and LabView are old paradigms, they have and are problematic for abstract tasks (they're only good for data manipulation). What's needed is a new style of programming that combined the best of visual and textual representations. Wolfram Language [1] and Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle [2] are more modern approaches in that direction. [1] http://www.wolfram.com/language/ http://www.wolfram.com/language/ [2] http://vimeo.com/36579366 http://vimeo.com/36579366
- simias 12y ago
  You'll also notice that while the comments are all plaintext, they're presented hierarchically as nested trees. There's also a hyperlink in your comment that I can follow easily, that's not plaintext. I'm not saying plaintext is bad, I'm just saying that we're not stuck with 80x25 green-on-black terminals anymore, there's room for improvement using our modern display capabilities.
  - mantrax5 12y ago
    Why yes, we're not stuck with 80x25 green on black terminals. Why even mention it? By the way that nested hierarchical tree is also written in text (HTML and CSS). So is the hyperlink. URLs? Text. Check any modern IDE and you'll see similar visualizations over text based source code. I can explore my project in a tree-based outline in my IDE. I can open my classes as an UML diagram. Turns out we're already in the future. Celebrate?
TuringTest 12y ago
I think you've identified an interesting problem in the "cultural dialog" around this subject - that legacy terms like "WYSIWYG" and "Visual Programming" are holding back conversation. The core idea in the article (that "Hacker Culture’s bias is holding back interface design") is a solid one, but a new term would make it easier to identify the problem without all the implications carried out by the broken tools of old. Maybe some new term like "Rich Visual Interaction", or "Web Application IDEs", or anything that ties the idea of development with using modern visual technologies and representations would help.

by simias 12y ago

markrages 12y ago

I notice your response was in the form of a few paragraphs of text, rather than a photo or diagram. Most conversation are "text-based". Our human brains have hardware acceleration for text processing and we're quite good at it. Since programming environments exist to make the best impedance match between programmer and machine, they use text. Language uses incredible composability to encode great complexity. Flowcharts are one implementation of what you propose. Or LabView: http://www.ni.com/cms/images/devzone/pub/nrjsxmfm912163998723206173.jpg http://www.ni.com/cms/images/devzone/pub/nrjsxmfm91216399872...

TuringTest 12y ago
Our human brains have hardware acceleration for image processing as well. Limiting ourselves to text is wasting half our natural resources. Flowcharts and LabView are old paradigms, they have and are problematic for abstract tasks (they're only good for data manipulation). What's needed is a new style of programming that combined the best of visual and textual representations. Wolfram Language [1] and Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle [2] are more modern approaches in that direction. [1] http://www.wolfram.com/language/ http://www.wolfram.com/language/ [2] http://vimeo.com/36579366 http://vimeo.com/36579366
simias 12y ago
You'll also notice that while the comments are all plaintext, they're presented hierarchically as nested trees. There's also a hyperlink in your comment that I can follow easily, that's not plaintext. I'm not saying plaintext is bad, I'm just saying that we're not stuck with 80x25 green-on-black terminals anymore, there's room for improvement using our modern display capabilities.
- mantrax5 12y ago
  Why yes, we're not stuck with 80x25 green on black terminals. Why even mention it? By the way that nested hierarchical tree is also written in text (HTML and CSS). So is the hyperlink. URLs? Text. Check any modern IDE and you'll see similar visualizations over text based source code. I can explore my project in a tree-based outline in my IDE. I can open my classes as an UML diagram. Turns out we're already in the future. Celebrate?

TuringTest 12y ago

I think you've identified an interesting problem in the "cultural dialog" around this subject - that legacy terms like "WYSIWYG" and "Visual Programming" are holding back conversation. The core idea in the article (that "Hacker Culture’s bias is holding back interface design") is a solid one, but a new term would make it easier to identify the problem without all the implications carried out by the broken tools of old. Maybe some new term like "Rich Visual Interaction", or "Web Application IDEs", or anything that ties the idea of development with using modern visual technologies and representations would help.