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Comment by Glench | Hacker News Reader

To make some of the ideas in this article a little more concrete, here are some research demos I’ve made:

* Legible Mathematics, an essay about the UI design of understandable arithmetic: http://glench.com/LegibleMathematics/

* FuzzySet: interactive documentation of a JS library, which has helped fix real bugs: http://glench.github.io/fuzzyset.js/ui/

* Flowsheets V2: a prototype programming environment where you see real data as you program instead of imagining it in your head: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1Ca5czOY7Q

* REPLugger: a live REPL + debugger designed for getting immediate feedback when working in large programs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8p5bj01UWk

* Marilyn Maloney: an interactive explanation of a program designed so that even children could easily understand how it works: http://glench.com/MarilynMaloney/

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These are very interesting! The Legible Mathematics one also made me think of APL, which is very hard to read - but specifically it's hard to read for the same reason that traditional linear programming math is hard to read, the lack of visual grouping[1]. I wonder how it might be possible to redesign something like APL to take advantage of rich text and more complex formatting?

[1] The weird symbols might seem like an initial barrier to this, but they're only hard to read if you're unfamiliar with APL; they're actually very easy to learn and remember, as there's not that many of them and they all do very basic operations. However, APL loves operator overloading and likes to give operators different functions based on whether they're used in prefix ("monadic") or infix ("dyadic") forms, and there are also higher-order operators that consume the operators immediately adjacent to them and then operate on the expressions after that; all of this makes the nominally right-to-left parsing require a fair bit of mental effort instead of being able to rely on immediate visual recognition.

Great experiments/demonstrations.

What are your thoughts on Mathematica/Wolfram Language? Some of these ideas are present in it (like mathematical typesetting, interactive documentation and live code/data updates).

I don’t know much about it. From what I’ve seen it looks like something Stephen Wolfram can use really well but I wonder if other people are able to use it.

I think it has its merit. It is a very _designed_ system which is definitely a side-effect of Stephen Wolfram's attention to it. But despite it being a bit of a singular vision, I do think that it presents a very complete idea of what a programming/computer interaction environment can be. For example it is like Lisp in that it is homoiconic and the whole interface, layout/formatting, the file format and everything builds upon this.

I really love your Flowsheets prototype, I hope someone pursues that direction in the future. “Spreadsheets with more tools from traditional programming” seems like such a powerful idea.

This looks fantastic! What a treasure trove.

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