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Comment by DonaldFisk | Hacker News Reader

> The first is that you can make better abstractions in text-based languages, too.

Not always:

The most general data structure is a directed graph. Is a formal textual description as good as shapes connected by arrows?

MIMD parallelism is straightforward with dataflow. (No worries about synchronization: processes wait until they've received all their inputs before running.) Again, shapes connected by arrows partially ordered in two dimensions is a more natural representation than text.

Finite state machines. Again, shapes connected by arrows is clearer.

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> The most general data structure is a directed graph. Is a formal textual description as good as shapes connected by arrows?

Oh yes. My company used a "visual" programming language for a workflow project and it's pretty much a directed graph with nodes -- the whole thing takes 50 printed pages to see the whole thing and is pretty much impossible to understand. And it's not even that complicated of a workflow.

> Finite state machines. Again, shapes connected by arrows is clearer.

Only for mostly trivial state machines.

>> The first is that you can make better abstractions in text-based languages, too.

>> Not always

Why are you writing and reading in text / code? Surprise, surprise - the English language is text / code. Please, to support your arguments send in some pictures or models or videos etc.

I've been working on http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/fmj/FMJ.html

It's ongoing work, and visible progress has been slow over the past year or so. Recently I've been refactoring the code, and improving the type system. One thing worth noting is that representation of functions as a graphs makes type inference more straightforward.

English and other languages are text because our ears hear a single stream of speech and written languages reflect that. Historically, computer programs are single streams of instructions because computers have until recently had processors only capable of doing one thing at a time, and we've usually programmed with text (GRAIL and DRAKON being exceptions) because that's all most terminals could display.

But for finding your way around a city by subway, representing an electric circuit, an organic molecule, or an elementary particle interaction, we use diagrams.

We should just use category-theoretic diagrams for everything.

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