Mastodawn

for all their flaws, one of the things that "agentic coding" tools seem to be legitimately doing is addressing a big gap in the programming tool space: specifically, introducing discoverability.

as a non-musician, I can open up GarageBand and make some beeps and boops and maybe eventually even get music out

as a non-artist, I can open up Photoshop and smudge around some colors by clicking on random tools

as a non-modeler, I can open up Blender and… okay bad example. I can open up Maya and

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Glyph Feb 15

point is, most software has an idiom where its functions are visually exposed. you can figure out how to make a note or a pixel or whatever and then everything else can eventually flow from there.

but software tools have not crossed that chasm for some reason. there were things like Prograph which never caught on, I gather that there are things like "node-based editors" for shaders & game logic in tools like Unity and Unreal, but these are extremely niche use cases

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Glyph Feb 15

if you wanna learn Python you gotta get a book or a blog post or some kind of tutorial system and learn about abstract symbol manipulation. nobody uses a tool like Scratch for actual programming and making the transition from Scratch to a "real" programming language involves *abandoning* the discoverable interface and moving towards the text-based abstract symbol-manipulation UI idiom that we all use

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Matt Campbell Feb 15

@glyph My friend Prof. Andreas Stefik and his team at the University of Nevada Las Vegas have done some good work on implementing a discoverable block-based interface for a real programming language. It's even screen reader accessible! (I did help them some with that part.) Too bad it's for their own Quorum programming language (https://quorumlanguage.com/) and not a language that anyone actually uses outside of intro programming classes.

The Quorum Programming Language

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Glyph

@matt a fascinating attempt, but messing around in the web editor it appears to be the worst of both worlds. and replicate nearly every single problem I complained about above with Shortcuts :). I certainly wish them luck in making this work, though!