/poll "Do you think the future of programming is" ...
# thinking-togetherm
Mariano Guerra
02/26/2019, 12:30 PM
/poll "Do you think the future of programming is" "Visual" "Textual" "Other (specify in comments)"
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jarm
02/26/2019, 12:39 PMš 1
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Tudor Girba
02/26/2019, 12:41 PMPhysical, too: https://dynamicland.org
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Tudor Girba
02/26/2019, 12:42 PMHowever, I also believe that the way we create (edit) software must be distinct from the way we understand (read) it.
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jarm
02/26/2019, 12:53 PMāCode conflates engineering and authorshipā I think Mr Victor said something along those lines onceā¦
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Mariano Guerra
02/26/2019, 3:11 PM
What role do type systems play on physical programming?
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jarm
02/26/2019, 3:51 PM@Mariano Guerra good question. Should your ātangiblesā system allow you to scratch your back with a pen, or should that be a type error? š
I like this paper for discussing the difficulties of integrating tacit real world knowledge and computational affordances: https://www.uni-weimar.de/fileadmin/user/fak/medien/professuren/Human-Computer_Interaction/Downloads/Papers_2012/BeyondAffordance-small.pdf
jarm
02/26/2019, 3:52 PMA prevalent assumption behind interface approaches that employ physical means of interaction is that this leverages usersā prior knowledge from the real world. This paper scrutinizes the assumption that this knowledge can be seamlessly transferred to computer-augmented situations.
The affordances of physical objects are potentially endless and users creatively select those that fit their understanding of the system, their aims and the situation. Designersā capability to design affordances āintoā objects, let alone restrict them to desired ones is thus limited.
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Duncan Cragg
02/26/2019, 4:13 PMYeah I replied 'Other' cos it's not a very useful question: there'll be both visual and textual aspects
Duncan Cragg
02/26/2019, 4:13 PMalso don't forget kinesthetic, auditory..
Duncan Cragg
02/26/2019, 4:13 PMwhat if you're blind?
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Mariano Guerra
02/26/2019, 4:18 PM
will someone work on that? the current afairs regarding a11y don't give me a lot of hope there š
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Scott Anderson
02/26/2019, 6:27 PMI agree with tangible and tactile, another relevant resource (http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/)
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Scott Anderson
02/26/2019, 6:32 PMLong-term I think a lot of programming will be declarative. Give a tool a set of constraints\heuristics or data (curated examples) and have it generate a program for you. The way to define data might be the visual part of the language.
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Ilari Kajaste
02/27/2019, 11:19 AMI think it'll be a combination of textual and visual - where visual is meant more of a "visualization", could just as well be tactile or similar. Even now most of coding is a combination of visual and structural (almost always represented as visual) - the code is text, and the file system is structural.
I don't think we'll be getting rid of text in code anytime soon. I don't think we should. Perhaps eventually, yes, since what text in code does is describe structures of logic - but right now text markup is a powerful interface for doing that. It would require coming up with a similarly powerful representation that allows for similarly powerful manipulation of the structure.
(When I talk about powerful, I mean how accessible it is for human thought, in addition to how fast it is for humans to manipulate.)
The far future of coding might not be textual, though. And I think there will be growing amount of visual assistance for the structure of code, and the text-based parts of code will reduce to smaller fragments while the structure takes more priority.
Ilari Kajaste
02/27/2019, 11:23 AMSo I'd say we'll be exploring the structure of a code in VR or such, while still writing basic logic interactions within it as text instead of connecting blocks or using visual structure of any sort for that.
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