

Hot or not: subtext programming language - ngvrnd
http://subtextual.org/

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PKeeble
As a real programmer I cringe at the Polymorphism example, only because I see
the point of objects is to encapsulate data with the associated methods and
this breaks all of that. Indeed you try to avoid inheritance and use
composition instead because of the very problem exposed. These examples struck
me as a deeply procedural low level way to represent these concepts, although
that common simplicity does suggest that really all objects are is a way to do
if statements better. That in itself is a idea that everyone knew but few
people ever said.

I find the GUI editor with a mouse painful and this GUI isn't helping! With a
heavily user optimised interface with at the very least some of the smarts of
Excel and a lot of hot keys (get rid of the dialogs, stop making me right
click to splice etc) then it has some potential.

What I think we need is this approach translated into a real language with
real libraries that have side effects and all the lovely mess that is a real
programming environment. Right now its hard to see just how bad it is for the
other 99% of programming that is grabbing from a DB and throwing data on a
screen (those poor corporate drones!).

How about the author hosts his website with the language! Building enough
infrastructure to do that is bound to help advance the language to the point
where its more than just a toy.

An interesting simple way to consider logic will be interesting to watch this
evolve.

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shaunxcode
It would be hot if anything new was happening with it, saying that the video
gives away enough of the concept that there is nothing stopping someone from
implementing it themselves. I personally think the dude should go open source
with it but I also understand the pain of releasing your child into the wild
before you think it's ready!

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jonnytran
I think the creator Jonathan Edwards has realized this. He released the source
here: <http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=160>

... and he also said here: <http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=177>

"I have realized that this is not going to happen inside Computer Science, at
least not at first. The idea with Juncture is to build something that might be
really useful, and is complete enough to allow other people to extend it."

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pshc
If someone can implement a useful programming language with non-textual
structure and do it right, that _would_ be pretty hot. (There are a few out
there, but they really need better editor support...)

I have had something similar in mind for a while, but when I saw Subtext, I
found that what I had been thinking about program representation (as inspired
by git) was very similar to the stuff in Subtext's papers, except that
Subtext's was much more developed in the vein of Smalltalk. On the other hand,
I found the decision tree stuff to be something of a curiosity; I'm not sure
if it's necessary for the Smalltalky functionality.

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mrtron
Subtext looks interesting.

I think this type of visualization would be fantastic as an eclipse plugin for
Java. It would be at a minimum a great teaching tool to new programmers.

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jonnytran
I'm actually working on a language of my own with a graphical editor, and I
had the same idea of using it as a teaching tool. When I started making it, it
was so much fun making that I thought others should be able to have fun
programming too. So I had the idea of releasing it under the guise of a puzzle
game (possibly with no reference to programming at all) in the hopes that it
would rub off on "real" programmers.

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khafra
No "real programmer" would ever admit to using it, but I'd love to get an
implementation that could talk to an existing set of libraries. Looks like an
innovative way to get some advantages of strong typing and such while
inverting the learning curve.

