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Gallery of Programmer Interfaces

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Re: Gallery of Programmer Interfaces

#3

Post by feiss »

Phenomenal compendium, I love it. There always have been a lot of visual approaches to programming, but only a few had a relative success, and always restricted to a very limited domain. There is no competition to raw text editing when dealing with big, general problems and projects (yet). Why? Information density, convenience and fast editing may be the main factors, imho..

Re: Gallery of Programmer Interfaces

#6

Post by Crinus »

feiss wrote: post #3

Phenomenal compendium, I love it. There always have been a lot of visual approaches to programming, but only a few had a relative success, and always restricted to a very limited domain. There is no competition to raw text editing when dealing with big, general problems and projects (yet). Why? Information density, convenience and fast editing may be the main factors, imho..

I think a more likely reason is keyboards. The main input device we use to interact with computers is a typewriter descendant, optimized for typing text. Mice are flexible but keyboards allow for more complex input.

Touch devices (like touchscreens or touchpads) could have helped with more direct manipulation of visual elements but they are always used on very limited (in terms of functionality and form factor) systems. On desktop computers they are far from ubiquitous and 99% of the time they just act as subpar mice.

Re: Gallery of Programmer Interfaces

#7

Post by phoe-krk »

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14290909

Copying erikj's comment from over there:

-----------------

I think Symbolics' Dynamic Windows and CLIM could be added to this gallery as well, as early examples of presentation-based user interfaces:

https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/41161/AI_WP_2....

ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/2004/AIM-2004-005.pdf

Re: Gallery of Programmer Interfaces

#10

Post by ejolto »

LordHeini wrote: post #4

Funny that some like Mathematica and LabVIEW have not changed much for more than 30 years. Those look mostly identical today.

The Mathematica screenshot can't be from 1988, it seems to be running on ubuntu 10 or newer judging from the title bar buttons look and position.

Edit: This is from 88 https://twitter.com/WolframResearch/status/10099016596554915...

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