On Thursday, 17 January 2013 at 20:17:06 UTC, Stewart Gordon
wrote:
OTOH, because we tend to view code in a two-dimensional form,
and even rely on line breaks and block indentation to make code
readable, I can understand people thinking of code as 2D.
And there are languages in which the code structure is
inherently two-dimensional, e.g. Befunge.
Stewart.
So far we have not considered what happens when we get into
parallel programming. It seems that the old ways of viewing code
breaks down. We have to represent in text form not just one thing
happening at one time, but many things happening at the same
time, so the dimensions increase and the interactions between
simultaneous cooperating components often becomes unpredictable
in ways that cannot be represented very well in text form. You
can still represent the code in text form, but I wonder how
effective that is compared with a graphical approach to the
problem, i.e., simulating the programming model graphically in 2
or 3D space.
--rt
