Exceptional coding style

[Russel Winder]

On Wed, 2013-01-16 at 03:54 +0100, Rob T wrote:
[…]
> I was just a while ago thinking that a reason why text based 
> programming has been so predominant may be that the ability to 
> transmit and discuss programming problems are much easier to do 
> when the program is represented in written form.

But this does not predicate that the stored form is a text file, just
that it has to have a text rendering.

> The minute you move to what could be a much more efficient and 
> effective method of programing, you suddenly lose the ability to 
> easily transmit the source code to other people. For example, it 
> is very easy to post code samples in this forum for discussion, 
> but if we represented programs in graphical form, we would have 
> to upload images instead which not quite as easy to do.

Why?

Smalltalk embodied all these problems and Smalltalk programmers have no
difficulty sharing.

> Another issue at hand, is when collaborating over the wire with 
> Git and other revision control systems, none of them operate 
> effectively when using encoding methods that are not text based. 
> Revision control systems just don't work well with binary files.

This is a big problem even with binary diff techniques. This is likely
the molehill that will be turned into a mountain so as to preserve the
standard model of text files for source code.

> Having said this, there may still be better ways of representing 
> programs that do not lose the advantages of text based 
> programming, but what those methods look like is not so obvious.

See Smalltalk.

The problem to solve is how to not rely on images the way Smalltalk
does. This was a soluble problem 20 years ago but no-one with money was
interested. Hopefully in the coming finding round the modern versions of
those ideas will get funded.


-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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