the fuck? On Sat, Oct 22, 2022 at 9:06 AM Peter J. Holzer <hjp-pyt...@hjp.at> wrote:
> On 2022-10-19 12:10:52 +1100, Chris Angelico wrote: > > On Wed, 19 Oct 2022 at 12:01, Peter J. Holzer <hjp-pyt...@hjp.at> wrote: > > > On 2022-10-17 09:25:00 +0200, Karsten Hilbert wrote: > > > > http://literateprogramming.com/ > > > > > > Right. That's one of the inspirations for my comment. > > > > > > But literate programming is of course still very much rooted in the > > > "linear text representation" paradigm. You have one definite source > > > which is a linear text. > > > > > > In a world of IDEs, databases and hypertext that's probably not the > best > > > we can do. As Raymond Hettinger would say, "there must be a better > way". > > > > > > It would be very different from mainstream programming languages, > > > however. And ideally you would want it to integrate with a lot of other > > > infrastructure. So that alone might make it a non-starter, even if it > > > was really good (which realistically early iterations wouldn't be). > > > > There are special-purpose languages like Scratch which are not simple > > text in that form. > > Yes, I know. > > It has a different goal though: Scratch tries to establish a friendly > learning environment. Get rid of typing and syntax errors that beginners > find so frustrating. > > What I'm interested in is an enviroment for developing medium-sized real > applications. Somewhere in the several person-months to several > person-years of effort, hundreds of user-stories, maybe thousands of > bug-reports and change-requests over its life-time. > > The people using such a system/language would be professional > programmers. They probably don't need much help to get the syntax of a > for loop right. What they do need, though: > > * Cross-reference between requirements and code. (Yes, you can write > comments, yes, you will hopefully have meaningful commit messages. > Still, I see a lot of room for improvements there) > * Cross-references between related parts of the code. (Yes, many IDEs > can jump to the definition of an instance or list all instances of a > definiton, But sometimes the relationship isn't that mechanic. And > yes, you can use comments fpr that, too) > * Views which highlight some parts of the code and omit others. (Folding > editors do that in a very limited fashion) > * For example, I might want to see only the code proper when I'm > focusing on an algorithm or I might want to see lots of context > (type definitions, requirements, test results, ...) > * Classes often have quite a lot of methods with no natural order. > Being able to view only a subset of them in some custom order may > help. > * Going back to the core idea of literate programming: Especially > views which show some requirement(s) together with the code that > implements them plus some explanation why that implementation was > chosen. > > Presented like this, it's clear that the "language" (i.e. the file > format) is probably the smallest part of the problem. How the user can > view the program, how they can edit it, and how to keep the whole thing > manageable is a much bigger question. And it would probably be a good > idea to start at the system level and not at the language level. > > > > My Twitch channel bot has a command executor whose language, if you > > call it that, is basically JSON - and the way to edit those commands > > is very Scratch-inspired. > > I designed a graphical filter language for database queries once. The idea > was that you could combine various operations (selects, projections, > grouping, transformations, ...) into pipelines via a web interface. We > did implement it (sadly it wasn't me who did it), and it turned out to > be a lot harder than I thought to make that actually usable. > > And of course there have been lots of CASE tools over the years. That > seems to have been mostly a fad of 90s. Still, there were some good > ideas there (although not alway implemented well), and something bubbles > back up every now and then. > > hp > > -- > _ | Peter J. Holzer | Story must make more sense than reality. > |_|_) | | > | | | h...@hjp.at | -- Charles Stross, "Creative writing > __/ | http://www.hjp.at/ | challenge!" > -- > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list > -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
