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Honestly, we need a programming language, any language, that is genuinely designed around the limitations of touch input while sticking to a textual style. I ca

by chipsy 12y ago

Honestly, we need a programming language, any language, that is genuinely designed around the limitations of touch input while sticking to a textual style. I can find lots of interpreters for various languages on my phone, but all rely on stock text editing controls to make me peck away at whatever I want to write - even the MIPS assembler I downloaded made you edit a text file. If we just embraced denser notational style, we could do a lot better without being particularly more elaborate in how the code is displayed or parsed.

pavlov 12y ago
I dream of a programming language that would bring coding closer to Japanese brush painting. APL's terseness would make it a suitable foundation for that. Imagine you're handed a tablet that shows such a program. At first glance it's a unique calligraphic image, but when you know the language you can also parse the data flow and manipulated types intuitively upon seeing the shapes. And since it's a dynamic digital document, you could zoom in, isolate parts, or even run "live coding" style experiments to see what the painting actually does.
- Pamar 12y ago
  Amateur ShoDo practitioner here: not sure that "Japanese brush painting" is actually a good idea for programming. Maybe you mean something like the Korean writing system: Hangul (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul)? For what I know, Hangul "glyphs" provide consistent encoding (see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Featural_alphabet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Featural_alphabet). In Japanese Kanji the "elements" (Radicals, or Bushu, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_%28Chinese_characters%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_%28Chinese_characters%2...) do _often_ work as semantic indicators (see for example Radical 85: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_85 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_85 which usually implies some connection with water or other liquids) but the connection may be obscure, or even look random - as an example (among hundreds) see 淋 where the radical for water, followed by two "tree" radicals means: "lonely, deserted, abandoned".
  - pavlov 12y ago
    Yeah, my idea is pretty vague. I didn't mean actually using any particular Japanese/Chinese/Korean writing system for programming, but rather something more abstract where elements of the calligraphic aesthetic would be adopted to serve algorithmic notation. Something like "this large brushy swoop here is the part where all those matrices on the left are reduced, and then on the right we have these leafy things that map them into coordinates"...
    - Pamar 12y ago
      Ok, well - maybe I'am going offtopic now but what I'd like to have is a _query language_ based on gesture. I.e. something to analyze data with. This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo gives an idea of what I'd like to have, but of course in this case the data "transformation" are pre-scripted and the speaker goes through a sort of coreography. Imagine being able to play with data interactively by moving stuff around in space around you.

by chipsy 12y ago

pavlov 12y ago

I dream of a programming language that would bring coding closer to Japanese brush painting. APL's terseness would make it a suitable foundation for that. Imagine you're handed a tablet that shows such a program. At first glance it's a unique calligraphic image, but when you know the language you can also parse the data flow and manipulated types intuitively upon seeing the shapes. And since it's a dynamic digital document, you could zoom in, isolate parts, or even run "live coding" style experiments to see what the painting actually does.

Pamar 12y ago
Amateur ShoDo practitioner here: not sure that "Japanese brush painting" is actually a good idea for programming. Maybe you mean something like the Korean writing system: Hangul (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul)? For what I know, Hangul "glyphs" provide consistent encoding (see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Featural_alphabet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Featural_alphabet). In Japanese Kanji the "elements" (Radicals, or Bushu, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_%28Chinese_characters%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_%28Chinese_characters%2...) do _often_ work as semantic indicators (see for example Radical 85: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_85 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_85 which usually implies some connection with water or other liquids) but the connection may be obscure, or even look random - as an example (among hundreds) see 淋 where the radical for water, followed by two "tree" radicals means: "lonely, deserted, abandoned".
- pavlov 12y ago
  Yeah, my idea is pretty vague. I didn't mean actually using any particular Japanese/Chinese/Korean writing system for programming, but rather something more abstract where elements of the calligraphic aesthetic would be adopted to serve algorithmic notation. Something like "this large brushy swoop here is the part where all those matrices on the left are reduced, and then on the right we have these leafy things that map them into coordinates"...
  - Pamar 12y ago
    Ok, well - maybe I'am going offtopic now but what I'd like to have is a _query language_ based on gesture. I.e. something to analyze data with. This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo gives an idea of what I'd like to have, but of course in this case the data "transformation" are pre-scripted and the speaker goes through a sort of coreography. Imagine being able to play with data interactively by moving stuff around in space around you.