On 2023-03-29 at 10:09, to...@tuxteam.de wrote: > On Wed, Mar 29, 2023 at 09:51:13AM -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote: > >>> I think you are being too harsh here. Such a question may come >>> genuinely from someone who hasn't experienced the power of the >>> CLI, which, once you've taken the firs step gently takes you to >>> small one-liners, little loops and bigger and bigger programs. >>> >>> It has this seamless "growth path" which helps and entices its >>> users to get better, something I miss from most GUIs, which >>> rather tend to degrade the user to a click machine. I don't know >>> whether this is inherent to GUIs or just the current "social >>> convention" underlying actual GUIs. >> >> I think it's the same underlying reasons why programming languages >> are almost universally represented as text: maybe it's just because >> of habit or "social convention", but I think there's something more >> fundamental at play, which make it very hard to make non-textual >> programming languages (and maybe even formal systems in general). > > Perhaps roughly 3k to 4k years of storing, transmitting and > retrieving information in written form have a part in it. > > It may be a social convention, but by now it runs so deep that I'm > convinced you'll find epigenetic traces of it in us humans.
I think it's plausible/probable that it's not so much about the format itself, but about the data/meaning/information attached to that format. Text has much more *nuance* and *detail* attached to it than any non-text-based programming structure I've ever run across, while also having more *formality* and *precision* attached to it than e.g. spoken-word conversations (which have a lot more nuance, because of the added information channels of tone and inflection and the like). If you can contrive another format for representing the user's intention that enables comparable or greater amounts of expressiveness, while not sacrificing much if any precision or rigor, I suspect that that format might be able to equal or surpass text for programming, etc., purposes. Good luck with doing that, though; if such a thing were practical, it would very likely have been invented long since. Unless it only becomes practical with a technology that's only become available relatively recently, but unless e.g. the recent forays into "AI" represent such a thing, I'm not sure what candidates for such a thing there might be. (And even those "AI"s are interacting with people through text.) -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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