> Well we've been able to put graphics on the screen for decades, but "real" enterprise programming is still mostly pounding keys into text files and fussing over semicolons and curly braces. Visual interfaces are considered toys that "real" programmers don't need.
You should at least consider the counter-hypothesis that C-style keyboard pounding is fundamentally more productive than visual interfaces.
This shouldn't be that surprising. Text is much more informationally dense than audiovisual multimedia. There's a reason why books are still the preferred medium for information transmission after thousands of years. Sci-fi style visual coding sure seems cool. But I highly doubt that it will ever be as productive as a skilled developer typing out variables, functions and classes.
Research has shown you focus more writing than typing. Imagine if you could program by rough drafting how your function works on paper. Like with arrows and all sorts of messy things connecting the structure of your code, but entirely understandable to another human what your function was to do without needing to understand a lick of code.
Take this example(1) from the R subreddit about how to do matrix math, and the arcane R foo required to actually do something that is pretty simply explained in OPs image(2) to anyone with zero background in R or programming at all. Now, imagine how much more productive the world would be if the computer could take an instruction in a readable form like the OPs image, rather than the R jargon code actually needed by the computer to do the math described in the image. People would be learning to write their own functions right along side learning how to do math on paper. Instead, people today pay six figures and spend four years to learn how to turn the math they learned by hand in high school into something that can be ran on a computer, same as it was 30 years ago.
> Research has shown you focus more writing than typing. Imagine if you could program by rough drafting how your function works on paper. Like with arrows and all sorts of messy things connecting the structure of your code, but entirely understandable to another human what your function was to do without needing to understand a lick of code.
I've worked in a company where programs were originally written with Max/MSP which is exactly that.
It was muuuch harder to decipher for other humans than normal C++ & Javascript code.
Everyone I know using patcher tools end up switching to real programming after some years, and being much more happy like that.
I actually thought about buying a Wacom, because I make so many small scratch notes I throw away afterwards, to later find myself really needing them again. Besides, having hand drawn diagrams together with the code may serve as excellent comments.
Embedding diagrams in code seems like such a no-brainer. You can do it with a third-party extension in Visual Studio, but it’s still clunky and too hard to use.
This should be a basic thing that IDEs help you do.
Fair enough. I agree in the sense that typing isn't what takes up my programming time. 1000 lines of code at 100 wpm (which most coders could beat) is what, 10 minutes? I wish. I've spent hours on a single regex.
I think efficiency and accessibility are at odds with each other to some extent, and we've more neglected accessibility and flattening the learning curve, because we don't need it, we already know how to code. But custom software is basically a subscription service to the programmers that created it. I had a client that hired a guy who had invented his own programming language and built their whole system, then disappeared on not great terms. Boy were they in trouble.
But come to think of it, regex is a perfect example of something that could probably be interactively visualized and made more efficient. Let's ask google.
So I'm in vim or visual studio or whatever and I want to use this plugin and I... what? Google it in a browser and copy and paste regexes back and forth? This is so not 2021. The lack of a shared information model between tools/paradigms jumps out as a big shortcoming.
In the JetBrains IDEs, you can pop up a little inline interactive regex editor + tester widget, type in some candidate text, and edit your regex until the candidate text goes green.
> Text is much more informationally dense than audiovisual multimedia.
This has it backwards. Audiovisual multimedia have far higher raw bandwidth than text. I agree with your (implied) point, though, that text remains the preferred medium for technical use cases like programming for good reason: humans can't parse a firehose of audiovisual stimuli into precise mental constructs.
Text's typically linear structure and low information density are precisely why it has yet to be superseded, I think.
I stand corrected; on this view text has more entropy due to limitations of our visual system and working memory (i.e., the encoding), no? We're pretty good at hashing short symbol strings to referents. If we could decode a grayscale image with the same precision, visual media would have higher entropy.
You should at least consider the counter-hypothesis that C-style keyboard pounding is fundamentally more productive than visual interfaces.
This shouldn't be that surprising. Text is much more informationally dense than audiovisual multimedia. There's a reason why books are still the preferred medium for information transmission after thousands of years. Sci-fi style visual coding sure seems cool. But I highly doubt that it will ever be as productive as a skilled developer typing out variables, functions and classes.