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Comment by LichenStone | Hacker News Reader

This is very cool. I've always been very disappointed that programming is so utterly dominated by the linear text format. It feels like so much potential for expression and feedback is getting left on the table, making use of our capacity to understand and work with spatialisation, patterns, sounds, colours, dynamics, etc would make a lot of sense.

Bret Victor's The Future of Programming and other talks come to mind - https://youtu.be/8pTEmbeENF4

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As someone who has done thousands of hours of programming in a visual language (IAR Visual State), I hate it. The promise of an easy visual overview quickly drowns in a sea of edge cases.

A picture says a thousand words, sure, but precicely what those words are turns out to be important. We use text for programming because it allows us to express ourselves unambigously.

I sure would like to see more visual representations of text programs though, this seems like the best of both worlds to me.

I've also had clients that used Simulink/StateFlow modeling for embedded state machines and to me it works up to a certain degree of complexity.

It works really well for a quick prototype, but for anything more envolved I find the cognitive fatigue of a complex visual model is much greater than keeping a mental model and looking at a narrow scope piece of text.

I wish we had a smarter feedback loop between trying an idea (aka typing stuff) and reacting to results. Right now tdd or type inference doesn't really produce backward infered hints. Types do help exhaustive matching but you may be able to reverse trials output back to function types and conditionals.

Your editor would become a convergence game.

A REPL?

Like SmallTalk?

Smalltalk is live object but, afaik[0], the base interaction is still work for edit, work for test, work for resolution. I thought about making them one concept.. something like gradually pruning input spaces. test and code being somehow isomorphic (each failing test is implicitely mirrored in the working code).

[0] I only did a pharo MOOC and read some bits about smalltalk but considering the crowd, it's possible someone has an image with similar if not better ideas.

As a thought experiment, the analogous argument could be made about the linearity of the HN comment threads (despite their tree structure, similar to programming languages). However somehow I doubt that adding spatialization, patterns, sounds, colors, dynamics would be turn out to be an overall improvement.

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