Comment by timonoko | Hacker News Reader

Comment by timonoko | Hacker News Reader

I remember in 1970 I was kicked out of some job and ended in advising total novices in BASIC programming. One older man had problem:

    "A=B+13 ei pysy samana". (= Does not stay the same)

After some pondering I realized that this man did not see the program as sequence of actions, but statements of relations and truths, which computer magically solves.

Very interesting idea, could this be more natural way of programming? But then I found MuMath from some BBS, and realized this new programming language of mine was just extended equation solver.

there's an entire field of programming languages which work just like that. One of the most mainstream ones is Qt's QML: https://www.qt.io/product/qt6/qml-book/ch04-qmlstart-qml-syn...

Here's a trivial example:

    Column {
        Dial {
            id: dial
            from: 10
            to: 100
            value: 30
        }
        
        Text {
            text: (dial.value * 100) + "°C"
            font.pointSize: dial.value
        }
    }

whenever the slider's value changes, all the properties of the text are automatically updated. Live demo: https://tinyurl.com/2p5z5ufc

Functional programming languages often work that way. E.g., in Erlang, if you've already bound a variable X to a value, and want to compute another value of X, you cannot use the same variable name - you have to use X2 or something else.

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