True. If I'm writing code I probably want to be sitting at a desk to do it.
And I imagine Gauss or Euler sitting at a desk in the middle ages writing on parchment, not trying to scribble something down on a notebook while barreling down the streets in their equivalent of a daily commute. Still, I think programming needs to be interactive. I don't think we need to give up text to give up keyboards. 90% of the stuff we type can be predicted by what we have already written in the past. Maybe these new devices really are for everyone else. Cubicles are good enough for programmers :) On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 11:07 AM, Brian Gilman <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Clearly there are some gaps in the programming models of this new era. >> How can people express themselves in a mathematical notation that >> isn't bound to 19th century keyboard technology? > > I think that the fundamental problem is that keyboards are good for entering > text, and text scales very well. > > Artists and musicians tend to heavily favor visual node based programming, > which is a better fit for mobile platforms. Just drag nodes out, and draw > connections. For non-programmers, being able to see the relationships > between visual blocks of code is much more intuitive than text. The problem > is, that it doesn't scale very well. Once a program reaches even a moderate > level of complexity, the graph of nodes end up looking like a pile of > spaghetti. If you want to rearrange your program, you end up having to > disconnect and reconnect tons of nodes. > > For systems without keyboards, spatial representation of code seems like the > intuitive direction to go, and would work regardless of whether the user is > using a multitouch tablet, or is wearing a pair of AR glasses. Getting that > to scale however, seems like a very difficult problem. > > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc > _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
