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: > > > which had special combinations for all the BASIC keywords). And if you > > > go this way, why not go a step further and dissociate the program from > > > its linear text representation? Add footnotes, different views, > > > hyperlinks, format mathematical expressions like formulas, etc. > > > > 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. 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. These are not general-purpose programming languages, but for what they do, they can be very useful. It's a great way to put together incredibly high level primitives that tie in well with the system they're in. (Imagine programming a model train set, with primitives like "change the points here to go straight" and "advance train #32 to the next red signal".) I'm not sure how you'd make that useful for general-purpose programming, but there's definitely a LOT of value in non-textual languages for certain situations. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
