samir, a terminally deprecated methodAn idea that may or may not be terrible, written down so I can get it out of my head and into someone who can do something about it.
What if we started from scratch with code represented as graphs, not text?
It goes without saying, but I’m saying it anyway: if you disagree with me on this, I want to hear it.
Terence Eden@samir have you seen the DRAKON programming language?
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/04/why-arent-there-more-visual-programming-languages-an-ode-to-drakon/
I find it useful for a certain class of algorithm design.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/04/why-arent-there-more-visual-programming-languages-an-ode-to-drakon/
I find it useful for a certain class of algorithm design.
Why aren't there more visual programming languages? (An ode to DRAKON)
I think the computer programming industry is about to reach a reckoning. No, not because ChatGPT can poorly plagiarise buggy code - but because a whole generation of kids have grown up with Scratch. And they'll want professional tools which have Scratch's level of usability. Hand-coding YAML files is a mug's game; one wrong whitespace and everything is broken. Left a semi-colon off the end of a…
@Edent That’s very cool! I’ll check it out.
Josh Grams@samir lol. On the fediverse, yeah, it goes without saying. Good luck stopping people, in fact. 🙃 😬
But since you asked... I don't know that I've thought about this recently enough to have good thoughts or links off the cuff but... in my head this has come to live in the same place as nuclear fusion: people keep thinking "wouldn't this be cool?!" and people keep being excited and convinced that they've cracked it ...and it's been "just 5 years" away for the last 40 years.
Or maybe a better analogy is Lisp or Smalltalk. Tons of programmers have this attitude that woah, they're so cool, but how many of them actually USE them as their daily driver? For most people, even in their hobby projects, other things outweigh the cool ideas those languages and environments have.
@samir I do think there's cool work that could be done here (and *is* being done, in some cases). But I've come to believe that the majority of the work of turning it into something that the average person would *want* to use on a daily basis is mostly a vast quantity of the kind of "unglamorous" people-facing work that the folks who are excited about the ideas would never in a million years be willing to do (or even see/admit that it *needs* to be done).
@JoshGrams Yup, this is why I’m not actually doing it. 😄