> > For me a novel is not just a list of characters.
>
>What else is it then? To me, on the surface, it is a list of
>characters. The paper and typography are minor details, setting the
>scene for the list of characters. The novel itself may non-linear and
>multi dimensional, but is represented as a list of linear characters.
Well there I simply don't agree. The paper and
the typography are not minor details. If we look
from programming structures back to the novel,
sure, everything looks like a list of characters.
But that's looking backwards from the perspective
of the array. Too easy, that.
If we were to discuss a photograph, would you
really go so far as to say that it is nothing
more than a collection of points?
>Of course the novel is far more than the component list of characters,
>but on the surface level, that's all it is. The
>same with a computer program. So what?
Hmmm. I have a feeling we aren't going to get
anywhere on this subject. If we keep going back
and forth like this, we should probably just drop
it.
>C is a particularly leaky abstraction, but this appears to be a straw
>man argument, because C is an intentionally low level programming
>language.
Yeah. I suppose you're right about C being a
straw man here. But Haskell, to take the bait, is
still pretty obscure to me. I never found Haskell
to be all that readable, despite claims to the
contrary. Whatever its advantages, it still
doesn't feel all that different than all the
other text-based languages.
>I enjoy knitting very much, when I get the time. I attended an outdoor
>"origins of programming" workshop in the summer where we sat and knitted
>hats.
>
>But what is wrong with knitting with text as well?
Nothing. Again, I wasn't making a moral argument.
There's nothing wrong with it at all! But I still
stand by the idea that text-based programming has
very little to do with linguistics.
And again, I prefer to code with text rather than
boxes and lines. It's far more powerful. But I
still think we need to look beyond this paradigm.
>"Playing puzzles and knitting" seems a good description of programming, to me.
Me too. So why do most programming languages look
like Scrabble? What about good old fashioned
blocks? Or tangrams?
--
/*
// 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 - 20:49:04 GMT