
Toward the next generation of programming tools - BerislavLopac
https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/toward-the-next-generation-of-programming-tools
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mimixco
It's CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) all over again! This idea
rears its (ugly) head every few years. It isn't a help to programmers.

The reason we use text for programming isn't "because punch cards," though as
a former IBM mainframe programmer I appreciate the analogy. It's because text
is an incredibly efficient way of communicating even the most complex
information.

A side note here: One of the reasons for Korea's rise to power as an "Asian
Tiger" is that, many moons ago, one of their emperors decided to break away
from the Chinese system of pictographs and replace it with a phonetic
alphabet, allowing anyone to spell and pronounce words. The result was one of
the highest degrees of literacy among nations anywhere. Alphabets are good for
communicating with people and with processors, too.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
I don't get this push towards visual programming. Visual programming works
great for visual stuff (for example the Forms builder in VB6) but for general
programming, not so much.

Programming is about abstract communication. If you look at human history, we
see a progression from visual (cave drawings, pictograms) to text (cuneiform,
alphabetic languages).

If you look at law which is in the business of trying to specifying stuff in
detail, the murder statutes are written in text, not with pictures of knives
and guns and a big red "x".

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david927
This is a funny article. The author essentially says,

"Alan Kay says software is bad but he isn’t being entirely fair; he's missing
things -- small, incremental improvements in some tools."

and

"The future will be visual programming. I have no idea what it could look
like. But it's already happening. But not in a concrete way. But it could
happen and in fact it would be easy if we weren't stuck in the past."

