[Semi OT] The programming language wars

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 21 March 2015 at 23:58:18 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> HS Teoh is right about context, and the superiority of the 
> written word for organizing and expressing thinking at a very 
> high level.  The nature of human memory and perception means 
> that is unlikely to change very soon, if ever.

Actually, the visual system is a lot more powerful than our very 
limited capability of dealing with abstract symbols.

But developing visual languages/tools for programming is very 
challenging and quite expensive given the foundation we have in 
math.

> No doubt these techniques will continue to grow in usefulness 
> (I certainly hope so, and am making that bet), but the ultimate 
> implications depend on your conception of what creativity is.

Unfortunately progress will probably be defined by the industry 
desire to commoditize the programming profession, which basically 
will drive it more towards "configuration" than "construction". 
We already see this? An incredible amount of websites are built 
on top of a technical pile of configurable dung, Wordpress (and 
Php).

Add to this that the new generations of nerds grow up with a 
different knowledge frame (ipads) than the programmers of the 80s 
who grew up with peeks, pokes and machine language. There is 
bound to be some shift in what the typical programmers do.