Ux, dx and ax

UX means User eXperience.

DX means Developer eXperience.

AX means Academic eXplanation.

The goal is to understand programming principles in a rigorous manner. Then, to sugar-coat these principles in a way that is palatable to programmers who “just want to solve a problem and get the solution to work” without having to learn the academic details and nuances. Then, to sugar-coat the solutions in ways that allow end-users to “just use the app to get their work done” (where the work usually does not involve thinking about programming, nor the nuances of academic analysis of programming).

Example - Loops

It is now clear that the most rigorous way to write iterative code is to use recursion.

But, programming practitioners like to think in terms of less-rigorous constructs, such as loops.

Currently, we force programming practitioners to bend their thinking habits away from loops and towards the more rigorous concepts of recursion.

Programming practitioners are forced to spend years in school to learn how to use recursion instead of loops, and, instead of learning more about how to ply their trade of composing real, workable solutions, to real-life problems.

Suggestion

A suggestion arising from this observation is that maybe we need to create a syntax for loops that maps easily to recursion and can be tightly checked.

For example, maybe:

f :: procedure (items : ListOf[integer]) {
  loop over items -> item {
      termination: empty;
      iteration: 
        do-something1-with (item); 
        do-something2-with (item);
    }
}

Where the iteration case is automagically expanded to recur with the rest of the list.

Where the iteration case is automagically optimized for lists represented as arrays (CDR-less lists) and generalized to handle general lists (with CDRs).

The above piece of code might be transpiled to Common Lisp as:

(defun f (items)
  (mapc #'(lambda (item) 
            (progn 
              (do-something1-with item) 
              (do-something2-with item)))
        items))

and maybe to something similar in JavaScript, like:

function f (items) {
  items.forEach (item =>  {
      do_something1_with(item));
      do_something2_with(item));
    });
}

Ux, dx and ax

Example - Loops

Suggestion

See Also

Blogs

Videos

Books

Discord

Twitter

Mastodon