>>All that said, I love to code and I love to
>>look at it. I think it's quite amazing. I'm
>>also fascinated with this historical hack of
>>associating the physical keyboard array with
>>the char * array with the programming stack.
>>But I cannot for the life of me see how people
>>can keep coding like this, i.e. from the
>>perspective of the history of human
>>representations.
>
>Well, maybe for the same reason they stopped
>using an abacus for everything and developed
>symbolic algebra?
Point taken. But whenever I program these
machines, I feel like I'm stuck back in the days
of using an abacus.
>there is nothing inherently linear about text,
Oh, absolutely. But most text-based programming
languages run like a string of perls inside of
the machine.
>just as there is nothing non-interactive about a
>book. You can read in what ever way you like.
Sure. But that's in part the power of the spine,
not of the string of characters on the page. But
you are absolutely right that text does not have
to be linear. Text is also used in tax ledgers,
which is obviously not just a linear collection
of words, and can be read in many directions.
Text can be used for many different things. This
is one of the reasons it's so efficient for
programming, as opposed to boxes and lines.
--
/*
// Douglas Edric Stanley
<douglas_at_abstractmachine.net>
// Artiste
http://www.abstractmachine.net
// Professeur d'Arts numeriques, L'école supérieure d'art d'Aix-en-provence
http://www.ecole-art-aix.fr/
// Chercheur, Laboratoire Esthétique de l'interactivité, Université de Paris 8
http://www.ciren.org
*/
Received on Thu Jan 03 2008 - 21:06:59 GMT