Alejandro F. Reimondo writes:
Provably the solution to do Not-What-I-Say is not to say it. I think the problem is to have a languaje (the power of Smalltalk is not in the language, it is the environment and objects). The problem of programming languages are extended to objects when we interact with them sending written messages. On defined languages (like Pascal, C, etc) the problem is reduced reducing the language words. But with objects, each object has potentially a language of communication.
How to solve it? Provably the better way is to programming with gestures. (see Mark Guzdial's mail on how to write a line). Like touching objects and programming by example.
"The see-and-point principle states that users interact with the computer by pointing at the objects they can see on the screen. It's as if we have thrown away a million years of evolution, lost our facility with expressive language, and been reduced to pointing at objects in the immediate environment. Mouse buttons and modifier keys give us a vocabulary equivalent to a few different grunts. We have lost all the power of language, and can no longer talk about objects that are not immediately visible (all files more than one week old), objects that don't exist yet (future messages from my boss), or unknown objects (any guides to restaurants in Boston)." --The Anti-Mac Interface, http://www.acm.org/cacm/AUG96/antimac.htm
This is talking about interface, not programming languages, but programming is really just user interface when the user is more experienced and more computationally ambitious, which is all the more reason that we need to be as expressive as we can (though I think non-progammer users deserve just as much expressiveness in their communication as well). *Sometimes* we can be most expressive using pictures (blueprints are a good example, Morphic being a good computer example). This doesn't mean we want to give up language, which seems to be the most powerful means of communicating with a computer (though the "language" is hardly as complex or powerful as human language).
I'm curious how these two means of communication (language-based and picture-based) could best fit together. Pictures still clearly play second-fiddle to words, which might be innevitable because computers (unlike humans) are much less capable of understanding pictures, which possibly relegates pictures to being the programmer's means of communicating to the user, but not to the computer.
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