Exceptional coding style

[Rob T]

On Wednesday, 16 January 2013 at 01:31:20 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> Or maybe it's just because humans are just linear-thinking 
> creatures. :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

--rt