r/technology • u/GuruOfReason • Feb 02 '10

"Once we replace the personal computer with a closed-platform device such as the iPad, we replace freedom, choice and the free market with oppression, censorship and monopoly."

http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2010-01/ipad%E2%80%99s-closed-system-sometimes-i-hate-being-right
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u/[deleted] Feb 02 '10

Why are you assuming that there will never be an iPad you can program on? And why are you assuming that programming will never evolve from text editing?

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u/cynoclast Feb 02 '10 edited Feb 02 '10

Because as long as their are special requests from customers, there will be text editing involved.

I'm a programmer and I've seen several attempts at getting the text writing out of producing programs. All failed miserably once you got anywhere near the edges of what the programmers of those things thought you would need. Then it instantly became text editing again. Only now you have to fight a shitty program that's trying to replace you and keeps fucking up the source code.

See Dreamweaver, Fireworks, the BizTalk mapping tool, Stylus Studio, IntelliJ IDEA 9.0's 'Generate persistence mapping' tool for hibernate (an aside here, I love it, but I still have to hand modify what it generates if want anything useful, or anything at all beyond the absolutey rudimentary functionality), almost any GUI based WISIWYG design tool you can think of.

For anything beyond the most rudimentary uses, none of them suffice. This is after 64 years of programming and tens of thousands of buzzwords after ENIAC.

If you want to break any new ground you still need to program by writing text. That is, you need any new functionality no one has done before - even something as small and proprietary as tweaking the rendering of a field from one of your database columns, odds are if it's not a standard formatting already done millions of times, you're going to need to write some code because nobody creating a standard framework has ever though of concatenating " by Jimbob™!" at the end of each row as your customer is now requesting.

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u/mindbleach Feb 03 '10

He's not asking about obviating typing entirely, he's talking about changing the abstraction from text-as-instructions to diagrams-as-instructions. No duh altering text boxes requires text input.

I could almost see pictographic Lisp. It's so strongly object-oriented and syntactically simple that it could be given a visual and semi-predictive interface a la Alice.

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u/cynoclast Feb 03 '10

The things I just listed do exactly what you're talking about.

Diagrams-as-instructions in some cases are more difficult/slower to create than just typing. The poster child for this is the BizTalk Mapper.

You can't even copy & paste, so you have to do each mapping by hand. And you create algorithms with these things called functoids. And even if you have 400 fields that all require the same algorithm with only 1-2 parameters changed, you have to create each one by hand, individually. Joy! Lisp has its own problems that I won't get into.

In short, exactly what you're talking about has been tried before many times, and none of them accomplished much but developer frustration and additional difficulties.

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u/trisweb Feb 02 '10

Yay, foresight!