On Feb 18, 2009, at 2:57 PM, Mathieu Bouchard wrote: > On Tue, 17 Feb 2009, marius schebella wrote: > >> because I think the concept of a visual dataflow programming >> language should be to provide a developer environment to people who >> don't necessarily have a programming background. > > Do you know that this has been said several times about various new > languages? Assembly language was believed to introduce computer > programming to non-specialists. Fortran was believed to introduce > computer programming to non-specialists. Cobol was believed to > introduce... no, BASIC is apparently more BASIC because otherwise > why would it be called like that? and then LOGO was apparently made > for kids to learn. And so on. What about Smalltalk and Squeak? same > thing. > > So, what is so special about visual dataflow, that makes it deserve > to be burdened by such ideals? > > That said, I'm not very fond of declarations, but I don't think that > it's an issue of programmers vs non-programmers, it's a matter of > people who like to declare vs people who don't, and that's a quite > different split. There are quite a lot of serious programming > languages that avoid declarations as much as possible.
Can you give some examples of how other langauges handle this kind of thing without delcarations? .hc >> I am sure this would be less of a problem, if the current setup (pd >> version, library version, startup settings) would just >> automatically be added to every patch. although... nah, maybe this >> is not a good solution. > > Well, it would add a lot of useless lines to every patch and would > eventually become a meaningless trace of how every programme was > made, much like unused variable declarations can distract, confuse, > waste time and take space in the mind. > > _ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... > | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal, Québec ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- News is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity. - Bill Moyers _______________________________________________ Pd-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-dev
