11–20 of 331 posts
I like the idea of category-oriented programming. Would be interested to see a white paper on what that means.
Here is the snapshot from when this was submitted to HN about a year and a half ago: http://archive.is/V2VwE My question: what has changed? Has anyone addressed any of the fundamental questions that were posed last time this was submitted? Are there any concrete examples of how you might use this for general purpose programming?
Interesting. I wonder if this is the future of not only reducing the barrier to entry to software engineering, but setting up a new tier of software engineer for the unskilled. Rather, would software have lower barrier to entry positions that are driven by piecing together software components like they would a factory job. I'm sure for most software a team is only necessary,but as software dominates our future, perha…
Interesting. I wonder if this is the future of not only reducing the barrier to entry to software engineering, but setting up a new tier of software engineer for the unskilled. Rather, would software have lower barrier to entry positions that are driven by piecing together software components like they would a factory job. I'm sure for most software a team is only necessary,but as software dominates our future, perha…
This is one of those things that always seems like it ought to be the future but for various reasons it doesn't take off. My high school computer class used a programming language called ProGraph[1] that looked a lot like this, but without the text representation, and it was neat but honestly it was more tedious to both read and write anything of even moderate complexity than a pure textual form. [1] https://en.wikip…
I find thinking visually to be quite limiting. Although having a mixed textual representation is interesting. I sort of get this with the Moose platform in Pharo which I use for analysis based work. The most painful part of that though is interfacing with foreign systems. And maybe Smalltalk... not a bad language but I've been bitten by the Haskell/Lean/Idris bug. A seamless FFI experience as promised with this langu…
I believe that there is no coincidence. English is horrible at representing programming concepts. A limited set of characters, restricted left to right reading and line based structures... is this really the best way to program? Intuitively, things like recursion, data structures, processes, modularity and objects etc, etc, are better represented with diagrams... Wouldn't Circles and lines that can move diagonally across the 2D plane be better candidates as programming primitives?
It's hard to say really. Functional programming is in itself a restrictive form of imperative programming that gains power through restriction. It may very well be that English as a programming primitive gains the same type of power through restriction as well. Our brains have dedicated modules for processing language as well as dedicated modules for processing geometry, shapes and diagrams. Which module is better for programming?
Let's face it though, English as a programming primitive only became prevalent for historical reasons similar to how javascript (a shitty, shitty language) became prevalent. We like it partly because we're used to it.
There has got to be a better way.
A lot of work in robotics involves software that maps to this style well (functional-ish, where data is being pushed through computational pipelines / graphs), and I think this could be a killer development environment for things like control systems, sensor fusion software, image processing / computer vision, etc.
The fact that it is going to be open source, and already seems to have some nice support for things foreign libraries, profiling support, and well as visualizing of your data visually (that image processing graph example!) makes me think you are going to get a good response to this. I also think there are a lot of hobbyist type projects (RasPi level 'smart home' stuff, algorithmic art / music, SDR, anything you see on Make / Hack-A-Day) who would love a tool like this!
I'm very interested in checking this out, and in contributing packages / libraries if that will be supported. Hoping to get access to the alpha!
I find thinking visually to be quite limiting. Although having a mixed textual representation is interesting. I sort of get this with the Moose platform in Pharo which I use for analysis based work. The most painful part of that though is interfacing with foreign systems. And maybe Smalltalk... not a bad language but I've been bitten by the Haskell/Lean/Idris bug. A seamless FFI experience as promised with this langu…
What is text itself but a visual representation of something complex? I repeat, text is intrinsically visual and just a restrictive form of the alternative which is diagramming. Is it a pure coincidence that the english alphabet happens to be the best primitive for representing programming concepts? I believe that there is no coincidence. English is horrible at representing programming concepts. A limited set of char…
When learning graph theory it can be quite useful at first. But once you start using set theory the graphical representation actually hides more information than it gives and intuition starts to get in the way of us discovering useful properties.