

Ask HN: Reversible expressiveness of programming languages? - ankurdhama

I have used many different programming languages from different paradigm, and all of them talks about how expressive they are, etc. I had this thought that the expressiveness of all these languages is in only one direction i.e from your thoughts to the code and the reverse of that - from code back to thoughts - takes around same amount of effort in all languages and this is really disappointing and leads to the use of alternate tools like documentation, comments etc. It may be possible to easily understand a specific part of the whole code base but that is no where near the whole picture of the system and what thoughts exactly were used to design the system. Also, we all know that code is read more than it is written.<p>Would like to know what people think about it.
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chipsy
It is a good goal. There are a few lines of thinking about this. One is to
stress discipline by coding in the "literate programming" style. Another is to
stress writing less code so that less has to be expressed. A third is to make
the language representation more suitable for gaining understanding at a
glance - this leads to most of the interesting visual languages.

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ankurdhama
The "visual languages" concept is something that has been in the industry for
quite a long time. I guess it may have been successful in some domain specific
languages but when it comes to general purpose languages, it seems that the
generality of these languages somehow make the visual representation not
feasible.

