61–70 of 83 posts
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I was expecting it to be filled with red, not just have a very thin red border.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=draw+a+red+filled+circl...
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=draw+a+green+filled+red...
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> Where is the red circle drawn? How large is it? What shade of red? How are those arbitrary values chosen, and how do I choose others? http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=draw+a+red+circle
I was expecting it to be filled with red, not just have a very thin red border.
"Make it possible for programmers to write in English and you will find the programmers cannot write in English." I teach computer science and have a particular fondness for introductory CS. The reason Stephen Wolfram is wrong, wrong, wrong about this is that people that have never been taught programming can't express themselves precisely enough in their native language, either; and even among those of us that have…
Thank you, you have just pointed out a likely cause for my improvement in writing scientific papers. I learned how to program.
"Make it possible for programmers to write in English and you will find the programmers cannot write in English." I teach computer science and have a particular fondness for introductory CS. The reason Stephen Wolfram is wrong, wrong, wrong about this is that people that have never been taught programming can't express themselves precisely enough in their native language, either; and even among those of us that have…
With the interactive nature of this thing people are going to learn if they want, just as people learned to type grammarless queries into google.
I don't think the point of this is for random-street-smart-kid to program complex systems seamlessly, it's more for random-physics-loving-student to try out things he still doesn't understasnd, and stuff like that.
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Draw a circle. Color it red. Make it smaller. No, 5% bigger. Make the radius 5 units. Refining specifications like that seems like the holy grail of movements like aspect-oriented programming, NLP or no. Separating concerns is a really good thing.
circle = Circle(); // default origin, radius, color, etc. circle.set_visible(true) circle.color = RED circle.make_smaller() circle.set_radius(5) // or whatever. just saying we can do approximately this already today, in most any modern language, as long as you're willing to express it in the prog language rather than the natural language. And I'm not sure having it expressed in a natural language is better in any sig…
A non-programmer cannot write code, neither in English nor in programming language.
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I was expecting it to be filled with red, not just have a very thin red border.
You're thinking of a disk: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=draw+a+red+disk
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The convention is arbitrary (e.g. most people don't have receivers on their phones and hanging up is done by pressing down a button not by placing the receiver in a horizontal position). If there were an obvious visual convention, the start button would not need to say "start" and the hang up button would not need to say "hang up." That's not to say that arbitrary visual conventions can't have great utility (the alph…
Why would you exclude text labels from visual programming? I think this is an artificial distinction. Sometimes they provide the best balance of space consumption vs. clarity. Labels on their own aren't natural language, they are at most terms put into context by the surrounding graphics; would your criteria be that visual programs use icons for every single concept? Also, you'll find that that where we departed from…
The context of my initial context was in response to "fully visual programming" in the ancestor comment and the implication that natural language programming faced similar challenges.
The expediency provided by labels is a result of the arbitrariness of graphic interpretation. I am not suggesting that the use of labels isn't helpful, only that the use of labels doesn't really differentiate "visual programming" as a subset of programming, i.e. in and of itself a text label is not significantly more visual than text on a terminal screen.
For example, the label is necessary because the visual convention for "start" is ambiguous. Left, right, top and bottom are all used as a starting position depending on the arbitrary conventions of the context. Likewise, a MaBell styled receiver, green flag, a vertical stroke or a hand with index finger extended as if to press a button may all be used to indicate start.
I used your departure from flowcharting conventions as an illustration of the unique problems with graphical communication conventions. I am not implying that deviating from flow charting convention is a bad idea.
My point is that your deviation from flowcharting conventions is arbitrary in the sense that it was driven by factors irrelevant to the process of flow charting (i.e. the limitations of the medium on which the flowchart is presented rather than concerns about the mapping of graphic symbols to processes).
First off, did he really have to plug ANKS? Honestly it seems like every piece of writing I come across from him he has to mention it. Secondly, I think eventually programming will have to become more mainstream. And this will be done through some form of a natural language interface. Programming is best a tool to solve problems. It's way too limited now where only an elite group gets to control its use. Eventually p…