On Saturday, 21 March 2015 at 23:58:18 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
HS Teoh is right about context, and the superiority of the written word for organizing and expressing thinking at a very high level. The nature of human memory and perception means that is unlikely to change very soon, if ever.
Actually, the visual system is a lot more powerful than our very limited capability of dealing with abstract symbols.
But developing visual languages/tools for programming is very challenging and quite expensive given the foundation we have in math.
No doubt these techniques will continue to grow in usefulness (I certainly hope so, and am making that bet), but the ultimate implications depend on your conception of what creativity is.
Unfortunately progress will probably be defined by the industry desire to commoditize the programming profession, which basically will drive it more towards "configuration" than "construction". We already see this? An incredible amount of websites are built on top of a technical pile of configurable dung, Wordpress (and Php).
Add to this that the new generations of nerds grow up with a different knowledge frame (ipads) than the programmers of the 80s who grew up with peeks, pokes and machine language. There is bound to be some shift in what the typical programmers do.
