I feel like a lot of people in this group think that storing

Question

I feel like a lot of people in this group think that storing programs as text is probably not a good idea Leaving editing UX aside what counter arguments can you come up with or have you heard from others

Felix Kohlgrüber · Answer

But all our tools work with text is probably the one I ve heard most often

Daniel Hines · Answer

Language is the material of thought In the most literal sense it s our most meaningful expression I m cool with an alternative filing system maybe the text should go in a database on not a text blob but I don t think we ll ever surpass language and to try would simply create a new language

Daniel Hines · Answer

On the other hand all languages are hieroglyphic in their roots which is to say that the meaning of the symbols were once not so abstract as they are now In a sense the visual programming tools are returning to a more hieroglyphic approach which I think is a fine effort But the tendency of language seems to be towards abstraction through what I think is safe to call poetry

Kartik Agaram · Answer

The future of programming may well be more visual graphical But text doesn t feel like the biggest bottleneck at the moment in getting from here to there <https futureofcoding slack com archives C5T9GPWFL p1547874166368000 thread ts=1547862690 360400 amp cid=C5T9GPWFL>

Doug Moen · Answer

My language Curv is for making graphics So text alone is not enough The contents of a PNG image file constitute a literal image constant in Curv In order to work within the limitations of the Unix file system I support several file formats for Curv source files A text file curv using a traditional programming language syntax It contains an expression and evaluates to whatever the expression returns A directory evaluates to a record value with one field for each file in the directory The filename of a directory component is mapped to a field name in the record value and the contents of the file are evaluated to the field value An image file png evaluates to an image value

shalabh · Answer

Storing programs as text isn t the same as using language You could have language but not store programs as text or in fact not store programs at all E g you could use language to create projections of behavior that interest you `show all causality paths that connect event E to any effect on entity Y` computer displays a text list You could use language to further edit the behavior via the projection `try remove path 3` computer shows options that would do this and a summary unrelated effects each option would have including tests constraints that would now fail `apply option 2` etc Above is a text only interaction example where there is the notion of stored text programs doesn t exist You just modify the stored behavior via some text query language It could also be imagined as a hybrid text graphical with button clicks instead of text queries etc There s many different dimensions when discussing text Interacting via text doesn t have to imply store a large text expression as the program In fact many visual interaction mediums also use text in a bunch of places

shalabh · Answer

Portability is the main counter argument I ve seen I think it s valid from the situated perspective A related argument is ease of programmatic inspection and generation I ll need a special lib to read your binary format but I can just open a read a text file

Ivan Reese · Answer

I think it s easier to make a text based UI than it is to make a GUI especially for programmers who stereotypically don t have much in the way of visual design chops So for that reason there are more people at the intersection of interesting ideas about programming and ability to realize those ideas when the ideas or realization take the form of text For that reason we see more rapid progress in text based But a consequence of that is that visual based programming ideas are under explored which is probably why this community is so excited about them Not sure if it s harder and slower and more costly is a legitimate counter argument or a just a justification In any case I ve planted my flag firmly in the visual languages are more fun camp so it s hard to come up with good devil s advocate arguments over the incessant neighing of my horse in this race

Dan Cook · Answer

For me it s about what is the best representation for each thing For a program or part of it that draws shapes that s better programmed by drawing shapes Or maybe a whole software system is better expressed as a diagram The point is that when you read or write a program you have to read and read and think and think all the while building up a model in your head of it But what if that model or structure was obvious at a glance See the Dump the parts bucket onto the floor section and animated images of the following Also see What if programming could be like the following but for logic instead of shapes The templating could act as a function or class Or for a REALLY deep dive into what obvious at a glance means or arranging your code such that you don t have to do lots of mental interaction to dig out an understanding of it see this very long but very worthwhile article

Dan Cook · Answer

Or in other words explore what you can on Bret Victor and Alan Kay and you ll get an idea of what most of us are mostly after

Ivan Reese · Answer

gt For a program or part of it that draws shapes that s better programmed by drawing shapes I ve heard this argument many times and I agree the some facets of it but It suggests that a program that is about generating text is better programmed by writing text It suggests that a program about making sound is better programmed by playing an instrument The logic breaks down pretty quickly when you start looking at more wild examples It puts visual languages into a box that they never seem to grow out of Sure they re good when you re working with visual stuff artsy stuff but they aren t good when making an ETL pipeline SaaS app PoS terminal etc I think this is a bit of No True Scotsman I d argue that the reason many visual programming languages are made for artistic uses is not because VPLs are well suited to graphics but rather because there s some classism going on real text programming for real programmers and that VPL stuff for non programmers After all one of the richest VPLs is Max MSP a tool primarily for working with sound not imagery Other than that one line I agree with everything else you said and I know that in general we re on the same page about all this stuff I m just trying to point out a weird critique that comes up pretty regularly that doesn t seem to hold water

wtaysom · Answer

Parsing tends to be a little tedious

Dan Cook · Answer

Ooh good point Maybe this making a program that facilitates a thing is not the same as actually doing that thing yourself so whatever the best representation is Sometimes sheet music or visualized waveforms are better than recording and replaying actual sound But in many many cases including the one I just mentioned visualization of some kind is way better because of the ability of the human mind visual cortex to process visual information almost immediately That s what Magic Ink is mainly about identifying what info is valuable to get at and using visual layout or organization to make it immediately understandable rather than having to dig and work and manually compare etc

Doug Moen · Answer

Since the question was about how programs are stored not about UX here s a link about the benefits of a new binary representation for Javascript source code <https yoric github io post binary ast newsletter 1 >

wtaysom · Answer

We could say that plaintext is nice because you can just `cat` it etc However a little experience has taught us all that there s nothing just about text encodings So even the text itself let alone programs written in text require quite a bit of tooling

Doug Moen · Answer

A number of years ago I had too much free time so I redesigned the entire software stack from the OS up to the internet Don t look for this on github the project was too ambitious to implement I decided that the Unix decision to represent most data as ASCII text is holding us back My replacement was a variant on S expressions called T code which was hierarchical and could encode anything documents source code databases images etc Instead of a file system your hard drive is formatted as a T Code store Network protocols would be serialized T Code etc The JavaScript Binary AST reminded me of this old idea Because Curv represents source code as Unix files and directories image literals are restricted by the syntax to only appear as initializers for record fields If I could use T Code instead to encode source code then this limitation would disappear and image literals could appear in any subexpression

jonathoda · Answer

Always bet on text <https graydon2 dreamwidth org 193447 html>

Doug Moen · Answer

< jonathoda> That blog post starts out with an image of a Sumerian stone tablet inscribed with 2 dimensional pictographic writing more similar to diagram based visual programming languages than 1D alphabetic text And I get the point 2D pictograms ideograms logograms mathematical diagrams math notation and 1D alphabet text all exist on the same continuum and are arguably all forms of text But text also refers to a particular file format a stream of bytes representing ASCII characters or UTF 8 code units with newline characters arbitrarily inserted by hand every 80 characters or so for compatibility with ancient tools like vi grep and diff originally descended from tools for processing 80 character punch card data Why are we stuck with this ancient text file format It s a poor fit to the modern abstraction of Text Why do we still use newlines Newline is a control code for the ASR 33 Teletype but we don t live in that world any more Abstract Text isn t a linear sequence of lines it is hierarchical lt body gt contains lt h1 gt contains lt h2 gt contains lt p gt contains lt a gt Modern Text can contain inline images but the text file format doesn t support this so the Unicode committee is helpfully providing a workaround by giving us a large clipart library embedded in the Unicode standard It is time to move on

jonathoda · Answer

< Doug Moen> I agree that ASCII text seems like an obsolete constraint But Graydon s point is that no one has beaten text yet We ve been complaining about text for decades now but we haven t come up with something better Time to put up or shut up

Doug Moen · Answer

I distinguished two meanings of the word text All of Graydon s points apply to Text in the abstract None of his benefits require the file format I am criticizing

Kartik Agaram · Answer

I like Doug s idea above of redesigning the OS to better support Text < wtaysom> s point about `cat` only exists because of syscalls built into Unix for working with ASCII Rather surprisingly I recently discovered that Unix was originally designed as a word processing and type setting system A slightly different historical path may well have given us a very different set of primitive operations for text

shalabh · Answer

Agree strongly with < Doug Moen> here There are a lot of meanings in the term text and Graydon s write up doesn t separate them out but just makes a blanket statement Because text is a good way to convey concepts to humans it s useful to have it in the UI But there s a leap from that to saying the UI should solely consist of lines of text with no other structure There s a further leap from that to storing those lines as is in files

shalabh · Answer

< Doug Moen> the T code OS idea is very interesting Do you have any pointers to write ups or retrospectives

Felix Kohlgrüber · Answer

Very interesting discussion Btw does anyone here really think in text words For me it really depends on the task Most often it s a mix of words diagrams tables concepts and structures I can t even describe properly I use text words for communicating ideas mainly because that s what most communication channels support Speaking and text messages just work with text words If there was a way in which I could directly communicate my thoughts to someone else without encoding them as words first I would probably prefer that because there wouldn t be as much loss in translation My hand written notes aren t purely textual and I can express my thoughts much better on paper because of that flexibility

Felix Kohlgrüber · Answer

Almost all text is ambiguous in some way and needs interpretation Humans are really good at this but not even close to perfect Computers aren t good at dealing with ambiguities and I d argue they shouldn t have to deal with ambiguities at all Because programs stored as text are ambiguous e g Which version of Python does this script require Where do I find the library numpy And what version do I need we invented a whole bunch of bolt on tools e g dependency management and rules so that our programs become less ambiguous It s clear that these ambiguities need to be resolved but we can choose when to do that I d argue that it should happen as soon as possible For example your editor should know that you write Python 3 7 by default and encode that in the storage representation unless you specify something else The representation shared between people should be unambiguous Think of it like talking to a human assistant If you tell them Please call Mary and tell her that Tom wants to meet her at 8PM the assistant would probably ask which Tom you meant and would assume that the time was referring to your current time zone Using the additional information the assistant could inform Mary assuming that Mary is unambiguous If they d just do the call without asking for clarification Mary would have to guess the exact meaning of Tom and the time In programming we re guessing and working around ambiguity issues all the time and I wonder if another storage representation could solve this

shalabh · Answer

I read somewhere cannot find the source that human cognition has two main areas linguistic and spacial I don t think exclusively in language but I cannot thing without language either Sometimes there s a back and forth where there s a vague structural idea but it has to be expressed in language to refine it I m also reading Metaphors We Live By Lakoff and am getting convinced that a lot of understanding and reasoning is about placing some ideas into metaphors of various kinds For instance the container metaphor something we tangibly experience when working with a physical box of objects pops up all over the place in virtual concepts as well

Dan Cook · Answer

MVC is about this As Jim Coplien puts it paraphrase I have this idea I want to communicate and what I really want is to reach into your head and mess with your neurons so you have it too But that would be messy so I have to do it through this interface gestures to his face and hands Communication between human amp computer has to be done through views and controllers and sometimes language

wtaysom · Answer

People are really great at picking a sensible interpretation from ambiguity in fact even if wrong words or phrasing is used people will repair it This is an essential skill for spoken speech where the signal is often really objectively off

Ivan Reese · Answer

We re all just waiting for the James Joyce of visual programming languages to come along to make an esolang that almost makes sense if you devote your life to studying it speak multiple languages collaborate with other scholars and never really grow out of that it s fun to try when you re in college phase even though you probably should ve

wtaysom · Answer

< Ivan Reese> off topic for video games I ve at least found the Witness which reads shocking like Joyce to me same sort of structural referential ridiculous sublime spirit Where Ulysses has Episode 14 along with all the other styles across episodes the Witness attempts to imitate the history of video games And of course the Witness references the Odyssey along with a whole high and low kitschy stack of everything else

wtaysom · Answer

And like Joyce the Witness is not for everyone

gman · Answer

the idea of pouring out legos makes me wonder if AR and hand based input might be a step I d argue a big problem with VPLs is trying to interact with them via a mouse and keyboard trackpad and keyboard or touchscreen Virtual 3D items in my AR vision that I can manipulate with my fingers might help remove some of that friction OTOH it s so easy to manipulate text Search and replace with regex Column select or multi cursor editing Those things are arguably harder in VPLs though maybe VPLs could make them less important Autodesk Maya does something I ve seen no other system do don t have that much experience with other systems though You can select any objects and then pick spreadsheet view Each row is an object each column is a field This lets you edit fields across objects to some extent you can select a column or individual cells and type +10 and it will add 10 to each selected cell Or 12 to multiply by 12 If nothing else it gives an easy way to see values of all objects Objects don t have to be homogeneous but of course it s less common to select non homogeneous objects