Show HN: DeepUI Programming Studio – A different approach to programming

Even the word "language" is biased towards text, or at least an atomic symbolic representation which is probably verbal.

I agree this is unimaginative, and probably naive. But dataflow/diagramatic systems tend to produce horrible messy graphs that are incredibly unwieldy for non-trivial applications. (My favourite anti-example is Max/MSP which is used for programming sound, music, and visuals. It's popular with visual artists, but its constructs map so poorly to traditional code that using it when you're used to coding with text is a form of torture.)

I think it's hard to do better, because human communication tends to be implicit, contextual, somewhat error prone, and signals emotional state, facts, emotional desires, or more abstract goals.

Computer communication lacks almost all of the above. Programming is a profoundly unnatural pastime that doesn't come easily to most of the population.

The fact that written languages and code both use text is very misleading. They don't use text in anything like the same ways, and code systems are brittle, explicit, and poor cousins of the formal theorem description used in math.

So the domains covered have almost no overlap. Coding is machine design, and human thought mostly isn't. It's hard to see how they can work together with minimal effort unless the machines explicitly include a model of human mental, emotional, and social states, in addition to the usual representations of traditional formal logic.

While I side with your central argument, there are numerous cases where the above is absolutely enough.

I had to laugh here, because that is exactly how I designed ibGib over the past 15 years. It is built conceptually from the ground up, working in conflict (and harmony) with esoteric things like philosophy of mathematics and axiomatic logic systems, information theory, logic of quantum physics, etc. Anyway, like I said...I just had to laugh at this particular statement! :-)

> Visual representations like the one in this video also have their shortcomings. The most obvious being, a monitor is 2D. Thought is not 2D. Going to 3D won't help either. Thought also not only spatial and temporal. For example, how would you represent concatenating strings visually?

> I think the more interesting question is how we can accurately represent thought?

In ibGib, I have created a nodal network that currently can be interacted with via a d3.js force layout. Each node is an ibGib that has four properties (the database has _only_ these four properties): ib, gib, data, and rel8ns (to keep it terse). The ib is like a name/id/quick metadata, the data is for internal data, the rel8ns are named links (think merkle links), and the gib is a hash of the other three.

The ib^gib acts as a URL in a SHA^256-sized space. So each "thought" is effectively a Goedelian number that represents that "thought".

This is essentially the "state" part of it. The way that you create new ibGib is for any ibGib A to "contact" an ibGib B. Currently the B ibGibs are largely transform ibGibs that contain the state necessary to create a tertiary ibGib C. So each one, being an immutable datum with ib/gib/data/rel8ns, when combined with another immutable ibGib, acts as a pure function given the engine implemented. This pure function is actually encapsulated in the server node that the transformation is happening, so it's conceivable that A + B -> C on my node, where A + B -> D on someone else's node. So the "pure" part is probably an implementation detail for me...but anyway, I'm digressing a little.

I'm only starting to introduce behavior to it, but the gist of it is that any behavior, just like any creation of a "new" ibGib, is just sending an immutable ibGib to some other thing that produces a tertiary immutable ibGib. So you could have the engine on some node be in python or R or Bob's Manual ibGib manipulating service where Bob types very slowly random outputs. But in the visual representation of this process, you would do the same thing that you do with all other ibGib. You create a space (the rel8ns also form a dependency graph for intrinsic tree-shaking btw) via querying, forking others' ibGibs, "importing", etc. Then you have commands that act upon the various ibGib, basically like a plugin architecture. The interesting thing though is that since you're black-boxing the plugin transformation (it's an ibGib), you can evolve more and more complex "plugins" that just execute "their" function (just like Bob).

Anyway, I wasn't going to write this much...but like I said. I had to laugh.