> This! > > There have been so many attempts - by people who were by no means > stupid - to replace text as the primary representation of code! > And ALL of them have failed, miserably! > The best anyone has ever achieved was to enthuse a few managers, > much to the detriment of the engineers who eventually had to use > the shit on a daily basis! >
Nope, there are some that succeeded. Latex documents are a kind of a source code. Lyx (lyx.org) very successfully replaces Latex source editing with structured document editing. It still has a Latex fallback (snippets of Latex embedded in the Lyx document), but 95-100 % of the document is pure Lyx. I see no principal reason why the same thing could not be done with a say C++ source or Javascript source. It would be actually pretty straightforward. Maybe many past projects tried to invent a new language together with the graphical (re)presentation. But one can just keep the semantics of the language. A source code represents a tree. When you lay out the tree left to right, top to bottom, you get something pretty similar to what a tediously formatted source code looks like, just nicer and more regular. Parentheses are replaced by indentation and frames or something like that. It looks almost the same except, as a bonus, you can embed pixmaps or tensor formulas in Penrose notation into the code. Selection does not operate on pieces of text, but on subtrees, so the editing operations are a little bit different. For example, you cannot produce unbalanced parentheses, because there are either no parentheses, or they are just part of the presentation, but not of the representation. > > Also: > 1D representations are established exactly BECAUSE they are NATURAL! > > The logical part of your mind (the neocortex, some people used to call > it the "left half" of the brain, but this has firmly been established > to be a somewhat shitty simplification) works serially in time: > > state(t+1) = f( state(t) , input(t) ) > > It works.... in 1D! An it likes representations in... 1D! > > Cheers, Frank > I do not think this is a valid argument. A programmer's attention may very well jump all over the code in a nonlinear fashion, even though his thinking may be a sequential process. The brain does not work with the source code character by character. It uses the highly parallel visual cortex to identify the structure. That's why formatting the source is so important -- you are basically creating a 2D syntax in an ad-hoc way, so you can leverage the capabilities of the visual cortex. The editor attempts to make this process easier in an ad-hoc way through functionality like "format paragraph" etc. > > > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc >
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