Goto Statement Considered Harmful Revisited
Jon Udell wrote (http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/01/20.html#a1155) on alternative programming models based on, for example, the tree structure underlying languages such as Java. He referred to a screencast and paper by Jonathan Edwards.
The factorial example brings me back about 22 years to the hilarious April 1984 CACM issue where Dijkstra's "Goto Statement Considered Harmful" was "solved" using the COME FROM statement including its more advanced variants of ON x COME FROM label, COMPUTED COME FROM (See http://www.fortranlib.com/gotoless.htm).
That article culminated with a demonstration of the powerful of this new construct. The factorials function was built using COME FROM. Of course it took considerable effort to decipher the logic and understand what it does and how.
When I look at Subtext, I get a similar feeling -- I cannot see and get it at once. I really have to work to decipher it. I guess the main reason for that is that us humans think in a language. We can think in different languages for different tasks but we cannot think without a language (with possible exception of enlightened few). What language Subtext offers us to think in?
Non-textual programming is rather common in areas other than general purpose programming. A well known example is the ladder programming model (used for programming controllers). There, the visual metaphor matches well with the subject matter and the graphical language is more concise than a verbal description.
/d
The factorial example brings me back about 22 years to the hilarious April 1984 CACM issue where Dijkstra's "Goto Statement Considered Harmful" was "solved" using the COME FROM statement including its more advanced variants of ON x COME FROM label, COMPUTED COME FROM (See http://www.fortranlib.com/gotoless.htm).
That article culminated with a demonstration of the powerful of this new construct. The factorials function was built using COME FROM. Of course it took considerable effort to decipher the logic and understand what it does and how.
When I look at Subtext, I get a similar feeling -- I cannot see and get it at once. I really have to work to decipher it. I guess the main reason for that is that us humans think in a language. We can think in different languages for different tasks but we cannot think without a language (with possible exception of enlightened few). What language Subtext offers us to think in?
Non-textual programming is rather common in areas other than general purpose programming. A well known example is the ladder programming model (used for programming controllers). There, the visual metaphor matches well with the subject matter and the graphical language is more concise than a verbal description.
/d
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