Re: Any interesting philosophy of programming articles to recommend?

[mattr]

Here is a topic to help you get out of the box, maybe something will click for you. You may already know about visual programming languages such as ToonTalk and Pictorial Janus. A short and fascinating article about these two programming systems called "Drawings on napkins, video game animation, and other ways to program computers" is available on ToonTalk's Papers page in Word and Postscript, and an interesting essay there about concurrency, describing how Toontalk eliminates deadlocks and beats the pants off of Java at threads, due to its lightweight model based on a universe which follows physical rules.

Some neat movies of PJ are also available. I realize this is probably not what you seek, but please note that Perl plays to our linguistic talents, while some people are better at spatial reasoning than at thinking in words. It is also evident from the above essay on concurrency that it is possible to build a system which by its architecture resolves whole genres of headsplitting problems. And Perl newbies may pick up the English-sounding commands relatively easily but might prefer explaining a complex datastructure with a pen and paper instead of dealing with all the brackets, parentheses, and diacritical marks you need to build and access them in Perl.

I think there are similar fault lines in thinking inside real-world software projects as well, not just in terms of technical expertise either. As the Mob Software article suggests, the pressures they generate lead organizations to latch onto fashionable methodologies.. perhaps you will find a solution?..

Update: The following post didn't show up on the page
There's also Max from Opcode Systems. I've played with it (a visual programming tool that lets you do anything with midi and serial cables), a friend was able to turn seismographic live from California into body-shaking sonics at a Tokyo art museum. The interface (which animates as it runs, and can be pulled and tweaked on the fly) is very good for technical artists.

[tilly]

It will take me time to get to trying to understand how they work. But another alternate computing model that I found very interesting was Flow-Based Programming. Toontalk's model sounds somewhat similar, though with more complex interactions available.

[Masem]

I once dabbled in a bit of Flow-based programming to develop a visual 'pipe' program in Java, to the point where the basics worked including plug-ins, visual editing, etc. However, I believe others have superceded my work with actual released projects :-)

But I'm curiously interested in developing something similar in perl with some sort of GUI. The back-end really isn't that hard, and with typelessness of perl, data transfer's a lot easier to handle. The fun, of course, comes when it's time to set up all the intra-process pipes and threads. Ugh. :-)

But to come down to the point, there's several different ways to think of flow-based programming. The one that seems to be most popular is that as used with Macromedia's products, where you have a flow-chart, and user-interactions determine which way you go down it. In this case, this is much less like flow-based programming than procedural programming with events. On the other hand, something where data flow is unaided by the user save to initiate it, whether part of a gui or not, is more interesting to think about.

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Dr. Michael K. Neylon - [e-mail] || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain

[mattr]

There's also Max from Opcode Systems. I've played with it (a visual programming tool that lets you do anything with midi and serial cables), a friend was able to turn seismographic live from California into body-shaking sonics at a Tokyo art museum. The interface (which animates as it runs, and can be pulled and tweaked on the fly) is very good for technical artists.