NOTE: If you plan on doing Charlie's survey, you might want to do that before reading this post!
I enjoyed the survey Charlie, it's interesting work that you're doing with Gibber, keep it up! However, I also couldn't help but think that the elephant in the room is always swept under the carpet with this type of investigation.
In my limited experience 'live text' is interesting in theory but pretty useless in practice. Useless because I don't believe that it is 'generalisable' in any meaningful way, and interesting because I hope that someone will someday convince me otherwise :)
I have similar concerns for `live/interactive programming' (such as Jonathan Edwards Subtext or the work of Roland Perera). Again interesting work, but I just don't see it being generalisable - in particular I don't see it working at scale (even at relatively small scale).
As a dangerously trivial case, what do you do with this line of pseudo code:
[0,1,2,3].permutations;
do we replace it inline with:
[[0,1,2,3],[0,1,3,2],[0,2,1,3],[0,2,3,1],
[0,3,1,2],[0,3,2,1],[1,0,2,3],[1,0,3,2],
[1,2,0,3],[1,2,3,0],[1,3,0,2],[1,3,2,0],
[2,0,1,3],[2,0,3,1],[2,1,0,3],[2,1,3,0],
[2,3,0,1],[2,3,1,0],[3,0,1,2],[3,0,2,1],
[3,1,0,2],[3,1,2,0],[3,2,0,1],[3,2,1,0]]
or even more scary is this recursive rewrite:
[[0,1,2,3],[0,1,3,2],[0,2,1,3],[0,2,3,1],
[0,3,1,2],[0,3,2,1],[1,0,2,3],[1,0,3,2],
[1,2,0,3],[1,2,3,0],[1,3,0,2],[1,3,2,0],
[2,0,1,3],[2,0,3,1],[2,1,0,3],[2,1,3,0],
[2,3,0,1],[2,3,1,0],[3,0,1,2],[3,0,2,1],
[3,1,0,2],[3,1,2,0],[3,2,0,1],[3,2,1,0]].permutations;
Even if we take a more 'manageable' example like:
[c,d,e,f#,g].reverse;
whether we replace it with:
[g,f#,e,d,c].reverse;
or this:
[g,f#,e,d,c]
has significant semantic consequences. When you mess around with the text, you are messing around with the semantics of the language (as the two examples above should highlight). No problem with this, but as soon as you start messing with the language semantics you need to start thinking about orthogonality.
Anyway, Charlie's survey got me thinking about this again, and I know that many on this list (including this sceptic!) have played around with various 'living text' approaches in the past, be that in the form of text replacements, gui overlays, graphical representations, 'spreadsheets' etc.. So I thought I'd dangle the fishing line and see what other people are thinking/talking about.
Cheers,
Andrew.
--
Read the whole topic here: livecode:
http://lurk.org/r/topic/3xZCE2sKMDxtHim7H5y9Vd
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Received on Fri Jan 30 2015 - 05:07:54 GMT