Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

If I were to invent a programming language for the 21st century

wordsandbuttons.online

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–184 of 184 posts

Re: If I were to invent a programming language for the 21st century

#181

Post by henrikeh »

Retra wrote: post #179
henrikeh wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that'd be useful for commenting but nothing else. But isn’t that a good enough use case? Almost nobody bothers to put proper formatting, diagrams, tables, formulas, references etc in their source code. At best we get ASCII approximations. To see some examples of what it could be like look at Mathematica, Jupyter, literate programming, and org-babel.

.. all of which require some kind of rendering software that has to actually be installed on your machine.

So do you need for images, photos, spreadsheets, PDF files, websites, schematics, board layouts, databases, mechanical drawings and models, neural network models, music masters, audio tracks, video footage and any other file format used by professionals.

Better yet, all the formats I mentioned are raw text and not even binary. And all have well developed tools for editing.

Re: If I were to invent a programming language for the 21st century

#182

Post by kbp »

fouc wrote: post #141
MauranKilom wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, the problem people have with learning programming is not syntax or abstraction - it's thinking like the abstract machine. Or in other words, understanding that having an array and a loop in your code isn't enough to make the computer understand and do what you want. Basically, the thing that the PB&J exact instructions challenge teaches.

It's interesting you mention an array and a loop, because those can be separate abstractions too. no need to think about loops: array.each {|x| puts x} need think about loops: for i in 0...array.length do puts array[i] end

The first example saves you from thinking about indexing; arrays and loops are relevant in both.

Re: If I were to invent a programming language for the 21st century

#183

Post by kens »

Iv wrote: post #177
dumbfoundded wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that'd be useful for commenting but nothing else. Whenever I see something in code, I wonder, what does this do? If I started seeing bold and italics and it did nothing but draw attention, I would almost certainly feel it a distraction.

More than formatting, I am thinking about defining things like function and classes in a formatting-independent way, and dismissing the order of definitions totally. You should have a list of classes and namespaces and not have to worry about how they are actually stored in flat files.

Yes, that too. There's no point imposing an order on functions and classes; I think that when you're looking at a function, related functions should somehow float nearby. (This doesn't seem to be a very popular view.)
Post reply on HN