why ; ?

[Christopher Wright]

Yigal Chripun wrote:
> personally I don't understand why we still use text files to represent
> code. that's just so silly. data in a computer is stored in binary form
> not text, so you don't get to see your "real" code anyway, but rather a
> specific interpretation of it. and this encoding is very old and very
> simplistic. this is identical to word for example only difference is the
> format used by word is a different binary encoding.

I've used Lingo, a proprietary programming language that uses a binary 
format for code. Of course, the code is largely textual, so it's the 
worst of both worlds.

The largest issue is finding an efficient means of recording intent that 
is Turing-complete (and can easily be translated to machine code). Text 
fulfills that wonderfully. Human languages do not, for a variety of 
reasons. You could come up with a pixelmap solution that is reasonable, 
but it would be compilable to text without significant difficulty, and 
text is probably easier to read and write.

The second largest issue is editors. Once you have your visual 
programming language, everyone needs an editor that can display it in 
order to program for it, which is a considerable barrier to entry. I 
tried learning Lingo recently, and though most of the code involved is 
text, it's in a binary format along with images and other data, so you 
can't hope to learn it without shelling out $800 for Adobe Director. 
Even if the editor were free, even if it were available for all 
platforms, it would still require everyone to use that editor, no matter 
its quality. And there are wars over editors, so this is no trivial matter.