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Comment by taliesinb | Hacker News Reader

I elaborate a bit on this point in my comment below about Scratch. My claim is that this 'pretty lisp' is still stuck in the flat-text mindset, doing something pretty much identical to indenting. Whereas what we really want are graphical (in the sense of network) editors.

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One of my "if I didn't have 30 other projects" projects is a minecraft type environment meets scratch event model/"build your own block" style system. Let kids interactively script their 3d world (and not just w/ redstone hah, not that there isn't something awesome about kids rediscovering logic gates from first principals!)

That's very funny you should mention it--that's been on my list lately as well. I have a nephew that I'd love to teach programming to--he's 9 and loves Minecraft beyond all rationality. I think a simple python/ruby/javascript meets minecraft where you can do simple apple-2 style graphics (material=green_wool; place_block_at 10,10,10) would turn him into a programmer for life.

You may want to look into "computercraft" http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/892282-11-computercraft-... which you can add right now! But I agree it needs to be more than just a terminal - it needs to have the feeling of crafting/building structures. Even if you could "zoom in" with a crafted microscope or something and then create circuits which you can then connect to larger sensors/peripherals.

It isn't a huge leap forward conceptually, but the boxes to show scope are a whole lot faster for me to read than counting parentheses.

Can you elaborate?

Not the gp, but I believe the idea is to stop displaying long columns of code like so much wallpaper and instead treat it like the directed multigraph it actually is.

What does that mean? I can't think of any graph-editing GUI that I'd want to use to write code.

There's a reason I still do my graphs in dot, and not in some WYSIWYG editor -- it's much easier to manipulate them.

I don't know. I don't think it exists yet. But have you ever seen an expert using etags/search/debugger/etc to bounce around a large codebase? The location of the functions in the file hierarchy doesn't matter at all. The important graph --the important graphs-- are latent in the code itself.

Bingo.

It makes you wonder why we store code in linear text files, when something more similar to a database seems a bit more apt.

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