By far the best talk at CUSEC ( http://2009.cusec.net/
) was by Jonathan Edwards from CSAIL @ MIT. Edwards claims to "seek to
better understand the creative act of programming, and to help liberate
it from the primitive state of our art." In addition to arguing for
iconoclasm in computer science and software engineering (academic and
corporate) and proposing a new discipline, "software design", he
presented his own programming project, Subtext ( http://subtextual.org/FAQ.html
), which is based on "schematic tables". It's a bit like dataflow
programming in that it's visual and you get instant results, but you
actually write the algorithms in boxes somewhat like truth-tables.
It was refreshing to hear somebody talking about something other
than web-apps, free software, and dynamic languages for a change.
"
Isn't this just Visual Programming?Visual
programming is the idea of programming with diagrams, for example data
flow diagrams consisting of boxes and lines. Though initially
appealing, this idea has encountered problems in practice, such as the
difficulty of comprehending large diagrams, and the effort of
rearranging the layout of diagrams when editing them.
Subtext takes the position that both text and diagrams have the
same inherent limitation: they are paper-based media. Subtext
represents programs as complex data structures that can not be fully
printed out in a human-readable form. Text and diagrams are used to
interactively present the program, not as a source encoding of it. This
is the same approach taken by WYSIWYG applications like word processors
and spreadsheets. Subtext is WYSIWYG programming."
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