

A dispatch from the "programmers liberation front" - alphazero

Johnathan Edwards may be perched in the academia, but he's a hacker and one of us:<p>http://subtextual.org/young.jpg<p>He's making progress on his attempt to reinvent the programming wheel.<p>Latest news:
http://coherence-lang.org/<p>&#38; This is absolutely must watch:  http://subtextual.org/subtext2.html
======
Donald
Edwards hasn't seemed to have solved the core issue with so-called graphical
(Edwards is calling it "non-textual") programming languages: they're clumsy to
the point of being unusable.

The table visualization might seem useful for some, and it would perhaps make
a nice feature/plugin for an IDE. But, frankly, I would rather muddle around
with boolean algebra than clicking around his GUI.

~~~
alphazero
I agree with you regarding the clumsy gui -- UML editors suffer from the same
general problem. What I took away from his presentation were the 2 core
points:

1) linear expression is intrinsic to text but not intrinsic to programs.

2) the machine is more than a tablet.

Who knows? May be the ideal interface is actually voice based ...

------
cubicle67
This led me to go read a number of entries on alarmingdevelopment.org

There's some great interesting topics here, along with some of the most
patronising discussion I've seen in a while. There's only so much of this
"This is a topic that literally kills programmer brain cells. I’m going to do
my best to be fair and not kill brain cells, and avoid getting called a loser
by the peanut gallery for disagreeing with you." I can read

