Beyond Text
I firmly believe that we need to go beyond text. At least to using rectangles, ellipses, lines and text (i.e. minimalist SVG).
- Rhetorical Q: How did Galileo get us to change from Ptolemaic Cosmology to Copernican?
- Rhetorical Q: How did we make the switch from assembler to C and Pascal? Assembler programmers hated HLLs and gave all sorts of reasons not to use HLLs.
- Rhetorical Q: How did we (normal people, not programmers) switch to using spreadsheets instead of ???
- I think, the “new” way has to be an order of magnitude “better” than the old way.
- I think that, in the interim, one has to incorporate the “old” into the “new”. Somehow. To appease the “assembler programmers”. (IMO, today’s “assembler mindset” is (1) the belief that there is “one language to rule them all”, (2) “everything must be synchronous”, (3) CALL/RETURN).
- Maybe we need to ignore the current crop of “programmers” and target a different kind of programming?
On the technical front, we need to overcome the fear of compiling non-text to running programs (I have example WIPs of compiling draw.io diagrams, technology isn’t the biggest issue). We need to overcome the mindset of using ASCII Art instead of drawing boxes (“{…}” == box).
Programming is hitting an asymptote caused by in-the-box thinking. There are things that we could express if we didn’t limit ourselves to text. Rhetorical Q: why do CEO’s draw things out on whiteboards? Why can’t we compile whiteboards? “a = b+c” is well-covered by textual programming. DaS (mini-VPL) ain’t “a = b+c”. Rhetorical Q: what “tells” are there that current programming is not good enough? The accepted mindset that “multitasking is complicated” is a tell…