On Mon, 2006-08-14 at 10:22 +0100, dave wrote:
> A lot of large scale software development is done wholly in UML, which
> is then converted to C++ and built.
Then I stand corrected... My understanding was that a lot of UML
modelling was done in English, which was then manually converted to
code. I imagine that this stuff is highly specific to the domain of
business logic though.
> > However there is something special about languages rich enough to allow
> > such things as introspection, self-description and so on.
>
> There is no reason that this can't be done with a diagramatic language
> as far as I am aware.
Oh I agree. I'm just trying to address the problem of defining what
livecoding is. If we can say that it's possible to livecode with
'visual' interfaces (although text is a visual medium, or at least
piggybacks on one), we need to work out what it is about languages that
makes them good for (certain kinds of) livecoding. I think it would be
useful to be able to say what livecoding is and isn't. Thinking about
diagrammatic languages might actually help us do that.
> For example, I've been playing around with a
> script that converts lispy languages into dot graphs, it's not working
> properly yet, but here is the graph representation of the program
> itself:
>
> http://www.pawfal.org/dave/images/dotty.png
Very nice! There is still some text there, it might be fun to replace
each token with a unicode character. Otherwise I suppose the difference
is that relationships between tokens are shown explicitly with lines,
rather than just their position on the page.
I can imagine an editor where you can program 'traditionally' using word
order rules, and then pick up and drop a block of text to a different
part of the page, and having a line magically appear showing its
context... Allowing a hybrid between traditional and diagrammatic
programming.
This wouldn't be far at all from whitespace rules in haskell, where you
can ident lines to indicate block level, or alternatively use braces to
explicitly define blocks and lay things out however you like.
> I just wanted to know what they looked like, but there is no reason you
> couldn't write an editor that allowed you to build programs like this.
Agreed, but what would be the point?
alex
Received on Mon Aug 14 2006 - 21:38:20 BST
