Why is there no or or and ?

[H. S. Teoh]

On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 08:56:58AM +0100, F i L wrote:
[...]
> Thought to be honest I doubt we'll all still be designing applications
> in text (only) editors, even fancy ones, in the next 10-15 years.

I know I still will be. I have never liked IDE's, and probably never
will.


> Software design is very modular, and even arbitrary logic tools could
> be better at presenting this data. Simple things like code-completion
> has gone a long way flatten the learning curve, and that can only get
> better when visual and audio logic can be manipulated in like-fashion.
[...]

True, but the initial learning curve *is* only just the initial learning
curve. Programming is essentially difficult, and whether the initial
learning curve was easy or not, sooner or later you will still have to
come to grips with the same difficult programming problems that will
require a lot of effort and ingenuity to solve.

Unless you're talking about trivial things like writing GUI interfaces
and stuff like that, which require no more than the usual manipulation
of arrays and lists and simple stuff like that.

Once you get past these trivial things, and get to non-trivial problems
like finding a good approximation for the travelling salesman problem,
or computing higher-dimensional convex hulls, say, you'll have to think
in the abstract anyway, so the representation really doesn't matter that
much.  Might as well stick with text-only representation so that you can
focus on the actual problem instead of being distracted by pretty
graphics.


T

-- 
Caffeine underflow. Brain dumped.