From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2009-08-05T12:08:08+09:00
Subject: Re: How Come Ruby is Text-Oriented?

On Tuesday 04 August 2009 03:50:12 pm Tom Morris wrote:
> Programmers aren't usually
> the sort of people who need desperate amounts of hand-holding in order
> to get by. We don't need it when we are reading our e-mail and we sure
> as fuck don't need it when we are programming.

While true, this also misses the point of the various visual interfaces.

Let me put it this way -- most of the time, I can do things faster and better 
from an irb shell than I can from a spreadsheet. I say "better" because I get 
to actually give my variables _names_, rather than having to remember the 
address of a cell, and I can let my arrays grow as big as they want, and 
insert things in between them, without worrying about them running into each 
other, etc.

Maybe I just suck at spreadsheets, but the act of making that particular kind 
of program visual removes a lot of power.

On the other hand, people who are not programmers can learn to do a 
spreadsheet -- which is, after all, a kind of program. (I'm not sure whether 
it's Turing-complete, but that's hardly the point here.)

So, the point of the various efforts at "visual programming" was to make 
programming simple enough for ordinary people to learn to do it -- the kind of 
people who do need desperate amounts of hand-holding, but are actually 
reasonably intelligent, on the whole.

And like spreadsheets, I think that's a disaster waiting to happen.

Granted, spreadsheets are well and good, when used appropriately -- though I 
would still argue that there isn't a use for a spreadsheet that wouldn't be 
better served by a custom program. But the real disaster is when spreadsheets 
are used for more than what's appropriate -- when an entire business bases 
major decisions on the result of a flawed spreadsheet calculation, or when some 
"database" consists of a number of spreadsheets emailed back and forth, or 
worse, accessed on a shared network drive... actually, I'm not sure which is 
worse.

Like spreadsheets, a visual programming language could have the same result. 
You can see some of that with Visual Basic, though it isn't truly "visual" in 
the sense being discussed here, but it has an "eternal September" effect all 
its own.