Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces • Hacker News Board

Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

#21

Post by orbital-decay » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 10:34 PM UTC

>Inherent, ubiquitous programmability: Currently, "doing programming" is a segregated activity from mainstream computing - separate software, command lines, specialist knowledge, clunky text-driven interfaces. This must end. Real expressiveness demands that every entity in the interface is inherently programmable - a table of data shouldn't just be a rendered picture of a table of data - it should be a table. Programming shouldn't be separate at all.

Almost every attempt at such an environment has failed for a reason. The problem with programming is not the syntax and other particularities, but inherent complexity of explaining the task to a computer.

Natural interfaces like modern voice assistants have a lot more chances to succeed than programming, because a) they imitate normal human communication and b) they are less dependent on unambiguous programming. And they are still limited because their fuzzy nature makes them unreliable and unpredictable.

Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

#22

Post by djrobstep » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 10:36 PM UTC

pshc wrote: post #7

Codebases are, in my mind at least, a virtual space. I believe that one day programs will look like factory floors or cities. They will produce and consume physical analogues for values and types, which you can pick up and examine. Want to debug a function? Strap on your VR headset, teleport into its physically reified room and watch the execution. Tinker with the pipeline in real time. I’ve been dreaming about this…

Sounds cool, although a long way away when we're still dealing with text-based development interfaces right now. Definitely need more immersive environments and fully inspectable programs, and actual graphics in our terminals and editors!

Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

#23

Post by hedora » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 10:41 PM UTC

orbital-decay wrote: post #21

>Inherent, ubiquitous programmability: Currently, "doing programming" is a segregated activity from mainstream computing - separate software, command lines, specialist knowledge, clunky text-driven interfaces. This must end. Real expressiveness demands that every entity in the interface is inherently programmable - a table of data shouldn't just be a rendered picture of a table of data - it should be a table. Program…

> Almost every attempt at such an environment has failed for a reason.

Basic and spreadsheets are notable exceptions. However, they don’t scale to complex programs.

Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

#24

Post by rakoo » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 10:43 PM UTC

lowlevel wrote: post #5

Sounds like unix to me.

Indeed, it sounds like the author is looking for the UNIX of the 21st century:

* Widely reusable meaning: everything behaves like a file. The types of files we can have are defined by specs: an Image can be described as a PNG file, which every process can understand. A table can be a CSV or a SQLite file. A Conversation can be a maildir folder. We might not have the best descriptions of "things" but we do have something

* Data without borders: if you can read from stdin and write on stdout, you can interact with the data. In fact, joining two tables is a base task and can be done with join (https://linux.die.net/man/1/join)

* Inherent, ubiquitous programmability: I'm not sure I understand the author's point, but it sounds like the entities in a software are too specific to the program. Again, if every "application", or rather set of utilities, used the filesystem with clearly defined specifications for what data is, then they can work together

What is not following the UNIX guidelines is definitely the Web and mobile platforms, as the author focuses on. There were some attempts at doing things the UNIX way, like uzbl (https://www.uzbl.org/) where every thing is a script away, or ii (https://tools.suckless.org/ii/) which gives a filesystem interface to IRC conversations. Want to parse a message ? It's just a string in the filesystem, any script can do it.

There's a reason it didn't work as well as we want, and it's that in practice it's all clunky and hard to maintain when the alternative is a single, unified application. Especially when the alternative is from a commercial vendor with a lot of cash. The incentives of doing FOSS that interacts with each other are not aligned with making money.

Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

#25

Post by djrobstep » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 10:43 PM UTC

orbital-decay wrote: post #21

>Inherent, ubiquitous programmability: Currently, "doing programming" is a segregated activity from mainstream computing - separate software, command lines, specialist knowledge, clunky text-driven interfaces. This must end. Real expressiveness demands that every entity in the interface is inherently programmable - a table of data shouldn't just be a rendered picture of a table of data - it should be a table. Program…

> The problem with programming is not the syntax and other particularities, but inherent complexity of explaining the task to a computer.

Not really. A great deal of the the complexity is accidental, not inherent. Take the example from the post of adding up some numbers in a table. The inherent complexity is very low, the complexity comes from all the stuff not inherent to the problem itself.

Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

#26

Post by mcguire » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 10:46 PM UTC

hedora wrote: post #23

orbital-decay wrote: post #21

>Inherent, ubiquitous programmability: Currently, "doing programming" is a segregated activity from mainstream computing - separate software, command lines, specialist knowledge, clunky text-driven interfaces. This must end. Real expressiveness demands that every entity in the interface is inherently programmable - a table of data shouldn't just be a rendered picture of a table of data - it should be a table. Program…

> Almost every attempt at such an environment has failed for a reason. Basic and spreadsheets are notable exceptions. However, they don’t scale to complex programs.

If you want to scare yourself, look up reports of spreadsheets with errors.

Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

#27

Post by mcguire » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 10:47 PM UTC

samsquire wrote: post #12

I call this idea If you can see it you can use it and right click use. So if you see a filename on the CLI, you can right click on the file name and interact with the file with a GUI. Or you could hover over a tag in the browser of some dot syntax or table and right click and click Use. It would run various heuristics over the data to work out what the data is and then import it to the right program.

Like the Acme or Wily editors?

Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

#28

Post by gdrift » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 10:48 PM UTC

ptx wrote: post #13

> We need computing environments ... without the concept of applications appearing at all. Platforms keep trying to enable this, but application vendors want to control the UX and branding, so they're not going to provide these generic reusable building blocks. Android, for example, lets apps make use of views from other apps and securely delegate a task (e.g. take a photo, pick a file, etc.) to the user's preferred…

Open intents is trying to standardize and promote such cooperation between apps on android. Tasker and similar apps are also a way to stitch together apps.

http://www.openintents.org/

Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

#29

Post by _y5hn » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 10:50 PM UTC

djrobstep wrote: post #25

orbital-decay wrote: post #21

>Inherent, ubiquitous programmability: Currently, "doing programming" is a segregated activity from mainstream computing - separate software, command lines, specialist knowledge, clunky text-driven interfaces. This must end. Real expressiveness demands that every entity in the interface is inherently programmable - a table of data shouldn't just be a rendered picture of a table of data - it should be a table. Program…

> The problem with programming is not the syntax and other particularities, but inherent complexity of explaining the task to a computer. Not really. A great deal of the the complexity is accidental, not inherent. Take the example from the post of adding up some numbers in a table. The inherent complexity is very low, the complexity comes from all the stuff not inherent to the problem itself.

Real world is always complex, ambigous and changing. So any simple model will in time be found inadequate, and complex models unusable.

The problem of programming isn't so much the interface. Text has been used for decades and remains a robust communication platform among humans. The real problem is defining the problem to be solved, its scope and adaptability to a complex and changing world.

The difficulty is the gap between vague ideas and real world outcomes of automation and human-computer interactions. To codify and implement ideas require precise understanding, design and adaptability which are otherwise demanding, understated and neglected.

Notice there is little need to focus on the tools themselves in this realization.

Update: Adding a bunch of numbers in a list is never a real problem, so is just an artificial construct.

Re: Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces

#30

Post by Tyr42 » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 10:56 PM UTC

pshc wrote: post #7

Codebases are, in my mind at least, a virtual space. I believe that one day programs will look like factory floors or cities. They will produce and consume physical analogues for values and types, which you can pick up and examine. Want to debug a function? Strap on your VR headset, teleport into its physically reified room and watch the execution. Tinker with the pipeline in real time. I’ve been dreaming about this…

I mean, pay Factorio and you can see it.