On Wednesday, 16 January 2013 at 01:31:20 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
Or maybe it's just because humans are just linear-thinking creatures. :)
I was just a while ago thinking that a reason why text based programming has been so predominant may be that the ability to transmit and discuss programming problems are much easier to do when the program is represented in written form.
The minute you move to what could be a much more efficient and effective method of programing, you suddenly lose the ability to easily transmit the source code to other people. For example, it is very easy to post code samples in this forum for discussion, but if we represented programs in graphical form, we would have to upload images instead which not quite as easy to do.
Another issue at hand, is when collaborating over the wire with Git and other revision control systems, none of them operate effectively when using encoding methods that are not text based. Revision control systems just don't work well with binary files.
Having said this, there may still be better ways of representing programs that do not lose the advantages of text based programming, but what those methods look like is not so obvious.
--rt
