On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 08:56:58AM +0100, F i L wrote: [...] > Thought to be honest I doubt we'll all still be designing applications > in text (only) editors, even fancy ones, in the next 10-15 years.
I know I still will be. I have never liked IDE's, and probably never will. > Software design is very modular, and even arbitrary logic tools could > be better at presenting this data. Simple things like code-completion > has gone a long way flatten the learning curve, and that can only get > better when visual and audio logic can be manipulated in like-fashion. [...] True, but the initial learning curve *is* only just the initial learning curve. Programming is essentially difficult, and whether the initial learning curve was easy or not, sooner or later you will still have to come to grips with the same difficult programming problems that will require a lot of effort and ingenuity to solve. Unless you're talking about trivial things like writing GUI interfaces and stuff like that, which require no more than the usual manipulation of arrays and lists and simple stuff like that. Once you get past these trivial things, and get to non-trivial problems like finding a good approximation for the travelling salesman problem, or computing higher-dimensional convex hulls, say, you'll have to think in the abstract anyway, so the representation really doesn't matter that much. Might as well stick with text-only representation so that you can focus on the actual problem instead of being distracted by pretty graphics. T -- Caffeine underflow. Brain dumped.
