Dimensionality of program code (was: Exceptional coding style)

[Rob T]

On Thursday, 17 January 2013 at 20:17:06 UTC, Stewart Gordon 
wrote:
> OTOH, because we tend to view code in a two-dimensional form, 
> and even rely on line breaks and block indentation to make code 
> readable, I can understand people thinking of code as 2D.
>
> And there are languages in which the code structure is 
> inherently two-dimensional, e.g. Befunge.
>
> Stewart.

So far we have not considered what happens when we get into 
parallel programming. It seems that the old ways of viewing code 
breaks down. We have to represent in text form not just one thing 
happening at one time, but many things happening at the same 
time, so the dimensions increase and the interactions between 
simultaneous cooperating components often becomes unpredictable 
in ways that cannot be represented very well in text form. You 
can still represent the code in text form, but I wonder how 
effective that is compared with a graphical approach to the 
problem, i.e., simulating the programming model graphically in 2 
or 3D space.

--rt