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Interview with Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, and James Gosling (2000)

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Re: Interview with Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, and James Gosling (2000)

#3
"It just feels like there's so much territory out there that's beyond the bounds of ASCII text that's just line after line, roughly 80 characters wide, mostly 7-bit ASCII, something that you could type in on a teletype. That's still where programming basically is these days, and it's proven to be a very hard thing to get anything beyond that."

Few things in programming are as stupefying and obvious as to why we all essentially still use glorified text editors to do "high-end" programming. I wonder if in a 100 years programmers will still be editing text. I'd like to think there's a paradigm shift out there but no one's found it yet.

Re: Interview with Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, and James Gosling (2000)

#5
post #3

"It just feels like there's so much territory out there that's beyond the bounds of ASCII text that's just line after line, roughly 80 characters wide, mostly 7-bit ASCII, something that you could type in on a teletype. That's still where programming basically is these days, and it's proven to be a very hard thing to get anything beyond that." Few things in programming are as stupefying and obvious as to why we all e…

Paradigm shift will occur, when we will deploy neuromechanisms allowing to directly interact with the brain. Pictures are more natural representation for our mind, so we probably will live in some super-unicode environment. No need to stick with ASCII, no need to encode "while" operator with those 5 latin letters, just some fun picture and that's all. Or may be block schemas will live again or modified block schemas. They are difficult to use with current input methods. Even with mouse it takes a lot of time to scroll and zoom big picture. And with neurointerface, when computer will show you exactly what you want in exactly millisecond you though about it, block schemas might be just perfect representation for imperative programming language. Classes might be represented in some kind of UML diagram or another similar approach.

That would be really fun time to program.

Re: Interview with Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, and James Gosling (2000)

#6
post #3

"It just feels like there's so much territory out there that's beyond the bounds of ASCII text that's just line after line, roughly 80 characters wide, mostly 7-bit ASCII, something that you could type in on a teletype. That's still where programming basically is these days, and it's proven to be a very hard thing to get anything beyond that." Few things in programming are as stupefying and obvious as to why we all e…

Paradigm shift will occur, when we will deploy neuromechanisms allowing to directly interact with the brain. Pictures are more natural representation for our mind, so we probably will live in some super-unicode environment. No need to stick with ASCII, no need to encode "while" operator with those 5 latin letters, just some fun picture and that's all. Or may be block schemas will live again or modified block schemas.…

The futurist in me thinks the following: in a 100 years programs will program themselves. We'll just need a reliable way to tell them what to program.

Re: Interview with Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, and James Gosling (2000)

#7
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paradigm shift will occur, when we will deploy neuromechanisms allowing to directly interact with the brain. Pictures are more natural representation for our mind, so we probably will live in some super-unicode environment. No need to stick with ASCII, no need to encode "while" operator with those 5 latin letters, just some fun picture and that's all. Or may be block schemas will live again or modified block schemas.…

The futurist in me thinks the following: in a 100 years programs will program themselves. We'll just need a reliable way to tell them what to program.

Great news, The Future is here already! These reliable methods for telling computers what to compute are known as Programming Languages.

Re: Interview with Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, and James Gosling (2000)

#8
post #3

"It just feels like there's so much territory out there that's beyond the bounds of ASCII text that's just line after line, roughly 80 characters wide, mostly 7-bit ASCII, something that you could type in on a teletype. That's still where programming basically is these days, and it's proven to be a very hard thing to get anything beyond that." Few things in programming are as stupefying and obvious as to why we all e…

Paradigm shift will occur, when we will deploy neuromechanisms allowing to directly interact with the brain. Pictures are more natural representation for our mind, so we probably will live in some super-unicode environment. No need to stick with ASCII, no need to encode "while" operator with those 5 latin letters, just some fun picture and that's all. Or may be block schemas will live again or modified block schemas.…

I think you're sort of on to something with how the change will come when we have a true major paradigm shift in programmimg. We're not anywhere near that though.

Text and programming languages: It ain't pretty but it isn't broken so don't fix it.

Re: Interview with Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, and James Gosling (2000)

#9
post #7
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The futurist in me thinks the following: in a 100 years programs will program themselves. We'll just need a reliable way to tell them what to program.

Great news, The Future is here already! These reliable methods for telling computers what to compute are known as Programming Languages.

The closest paradigm to what I was trying to imply are more general purpose declarative languages. Something like sql or rich logic libraries that let the developer describe the desired result rather than the 'how.' Now advance this by 100 years, and I would hope anyone can program arbitrarily complex things by using graphical/natural-language tools to specify constraints, and then the 'program' arbitrarily generates the lower-level code.
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