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Re: Code Readability. Break Rule Number 5?

by samizdat (Vicar)
on Apr 20, 2007 at 13:44 UTC ( [id://611157]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Code Readability. Break Rule Number 5?

What a great topic, DACONTI!

I, like others posting here, often sneak code into embedded environments through hokey serial port consoles. Forget ASCII, my stuff is just a bunch of binary bits.

However, I'm absolutely not against making my development system more powerful. In my first college course, we studied a potpourri of languages including APL and SNOBOL (Ralph Griswold was a senior prof at U of Arizona ;-). I, too, was taken by the compact mathematical elegance of APL with its rich set of operators. Certainly there were some really good ideas in there. Expressing everything as an array of data points that are operated on by simple expressions with automatic iteration makes a lot of problem solving algorithms crystal clear. For scientific and statistical data, APL rocks and rolls.

Since that time, with twenty years of reflection hard work, and legacy maintenance, I've come to take the opposite approach. I hate syntax. I hate having to remember anything, because I'm always switching contexts (and languages!) from one project or portion thereof to another. I love having a mouse-oriented development environment with element highlighting and object browsers and hyperlinking embedded in the presentation of my code.

I just wish I could use it everywhere, and therein lies the rub. There will be languages that operate on the level you describe, and that's a good thing, but there will also be down-and-dirty kitchen-sink-and-garbage-disposal languages like Perl that get down to real work.

Think for a moment about Macintoshes versus x86 PCs. The Mac had its nifty little toolbox and GUI, and lots of people thought it was the cat's meow, but I didn't see a whole lot of Macs in factories or embedded development. More to the point, I saw a whole lot more PCs everywhere than I saw Macs. Sure, programming PCs and x86's in general was a lot more messy than programming Macs, but the point was that you COULD program a PC to stand on its head in a pile of doo-doo and get it to work, whereas you could never get far enough into a Mac to do anything beyond its GUI and its filesystem.

Methinks it'll be a long time before the natural selection of languages and the systems they operate on will get us beyond the command line of some form of text interaction, at one level or another, just because SOMEBODY always has to be able to come in the back door or lift the hood. Doesn't mean it isn't a great arena to explore. Now that displays and display controllers are being embedded into the simplest widgets, who can tell what the future will bring in terms of the available capabilities in targets?

UPDATE: to the general question:
  • Is the pen still mighty in the computer age?, think "ASCII-based programming" where they talk about "the pen"

  • "One little girl said, 'I don't like to write, because when you make a mistake you have to erase. On the computer, you just go back.’” – James Miles, senior associate, International Center for Leadership and Education, regarding the transformation of typing from handwriting in society.

Don Wilde
"There's more than one level to any answer."

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