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Comment by otabdeveloper2 | Hacker News Reader

No, you don't want this. Every new generation of new programmers since the 1960's talks about this, but nobody to date has actually written any useful program using pictures and prose.

Sorry. Code is code, that's what your job entails and you can't make programming into something it isn't.

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To be fair, Waterluvian was talking about including pictures and tables and such in comments, while still writing actual code. It's probably still a horrible idea, but for much more subtle (and less certain) reasons than "waaah, I don't want to have to do programming in order to make a program".

Would it be "a horrible idea" to include diagrams in code that implements a graph algorithm, or images in image-processing code?

Exactly this. Every sufficiently complex program that refers to graphs DO have those graphs. They are either in a separate document, or in the programmers head, or (poorly) added to the source code. There are plugins (e.g. for Visual Studio) that will render images refered to by file paths, in the editor. For complex graph-related stuff I imagine that can be pretty neat.

Python+sphinx allows to get that (and a lot more).

I would love to be able to include pictures and diagrams in comments. If it was in a text format like HTML or JSON it would source control nicely. The IDE could then display and allow editing them.

Slap a text editor into doxygen documentation and you'd basically have this.

I've heard this said about every new generation of programming techniques. It's true about every technique for which tooling isn't yet widely available, right up until somebody writes the necessary tools.

You could replace the subject of your comment with, say, "automatic garbage collection", and it would have been equally true ("that's just what your job entails!"), right up until GC made its way into the first mainstream languages, and it very quickly became a tool used by almost everybody.

GC is a much older technique than it looks, though: it's described in McCarthy's 1959 Lisp paper. https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/papers-we-love/...

We spent about 3 decades arguing back and forth about performance until the wave of bytecode+GC languages took over and accepted those tradeoffs: Perl, Python, Java, Javascript.

Holdouts remain in the high performance, embedded, and deterministic areas of software.

Code as live objects is almost as old (Lisp, Smalltalk)

The point is that the idea of drawing diagrams instead of writing code (and/or integrating documentation text right into the source code) is a really old idea.

The idea is older than structured programming, older than the C programming language, older than the idea of object-orientation. It's probably even older than McCarthy's LISP.

Safe to say that if it hadn't caught on during this time, then it never will.

People developing safety critical embedded systems using ANSYS’ SCADE Suite would disagree about nobody having written useful programs using pictures and prose.

Code is code, but sometimes pages of code implement a simple mathematical equation or a process diagram. I would like to see it in addition to the code.

Add a plugin to your IDE, to display embedded graphics from comments.

Isn't this more an IDE problem than a language problem?

That isn't what he was saying, nor is what you are saying true. There isn't an intrinsic reason for code to be a text stream. There are environments that are in broad use where it is not, such as Simulink, LabView, and some of the big game engines today.

It's easy to be parochial about this when Unix like environments force everyone into a lowest common denominator of text streams, but don't take the limitations and bad ideas of Unix as laws of the universe.

Edit:

Summarizing the list of non-text mode programming languages in general use that people have mentioned in this thread:

ANSYS SCADE

Sikuli

Unity

LabView

Simulink

max/msp

SynthMaker

Kyme

LUSTRE

plenty of peopple are writing programs which get actual usage in visual languages - e.g. with max/msp, or the old SynthMaker, Kyma... as wells as some avionics software written in e.g. LUSTRE...

More recently, Unreal Engine's Blueprints too (and UE's Kismet before that). 3D modelling tools and texturing tools also often use visual languages for shaders, and, as you've mentioned, in audio its also relatively common. Lustre/SCADE is my favourite example though (and is used in a lot more than just avionics too, according to the ANSYS marketing material: transportation, energy, etc)

Unity definitely and effectively mixes pictures, audio and code, and has a large chunk of the mobile app market. It's automatic asset import is very good and fully customizable.

i guess i’m not a programmer copying all these pictures, diagrams, and comments with arrows anchored to the relevant code portions. (yes, i am able and do do this.)

This is not true. Sikuli was a super cool language, and it was fun to write with. I'm sorry it hasn't received more attention.

I want something like Rap Genius but in my editor.

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