2009/10/18 alex <alex_at_slab.org>:
> From what you say I guess in most languages you give things names to
> help you remember what they're for, and in pd and max you give them
> shapes. The interpreter doesn't care what names or shapes you give
> them, but they're near essential for human understanding. Actually
> from this perspective the visual/textual distinction is clear, it's
> not in the computation but in the presentation of it.
I looked into this a bit more, others have noticed the analog between
arrangement in visual languages and variable names, indentation etc in
textual ones. It's called "secondary notation".
The section of secondary notation in this paper is quite interesting:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/greenery/workStuff/Papers/UsabilityVPs.PDF
for example:
"One of our informants reported “I quite often spend an hour or two
just moving boxes and
wires around, with no change in functionality, to make it that much
more comprehensible when I come
back to it.” It is hard to imagine a Pascal programmer having to spend
an hour or two doing nothing but
re-arranging the components of the program to make it comprehensible.
Text-based programmers are
aware of the need for white space and indenting, but usually they
solve it as they go along. (On the other
hand, text-based programmers might spend that much time going back
over a program and inserting com-
ments. Maybe this is a case of swings and roundabouts.)"
alex
--
http://yaxu.org/
Received on Thu Oct 29 2009 - 16:47:18 GMT