I think the tablet COULD be a perfectly good device for content creation if people would just do the damned UI design work to make it good. Right now, we haven’t figured it out. This is where graphical input could be very useful. \1 @mentions This is a whole other story. It seems that […]
Category Archives: Opinion
Against Direct Manipulation
I’m debating on Twitter about Direct Manipulation. Here’s the first part of my discussion unrolled. I’m asked why I think the Desktop Metaphor has held us back. My response in 6 tweets. (Note that there’s a lot more good discussion in further pushback I get) Complicated for Twitter. Here’s what I think in summary. […]
Browsers Accessing the Local Disk
After writing Why isn’t browser based programming or browser based IDEs more popular? – Smart Disorganized I want to emphasize and ask again. Why aren’t the browser makers offering us a way for web-apps to read and write from the local disk? I know that it’s a mega security issue. But it should be possible […]
Why isn’t browser based programming or browser based IDEs more popular?
My Quora answer : Basically because most programmers use a bunch of other tools that are local, on their hard disk. These include compilers, libraries, source control, unit-testing frameworks, CI/CD pipelines etc. etc. And browsers, because of their security model, are really bad at talking to the local disk. So, if you want to use […]
Extra thoughts on “Assemblage” Oriented Programming
Brief followup thoughts on the previous article. Read that first. Classes? Classes are really just techniques to help construct objects. In an “Assemblage” language the Assemblage or Pattern itself is the way you construct the objects. The grammar explains how to parse a plain EDN or JSON-like data-literal into the assemblage. So perhaps we don’t […]
What’s wrong with OO?
Some thinking over at Quora : What’s wrong with OO? Continuing some thoughts that have been haunting me since I originally phrased them in the answer about designing the perfect programming language : Phil Jones’s answer to How would you design the perfect programming language?. And in response to Alan Mellor‘s comment on Phil Jones’s […]
A Tower of Simple Systems
I posted this on Future Programming at Quora : A Tower of Simple Systems Re-reading the answer I reposted here a couple of days ago about the “Holy Grail” of programming language design : modification. https://www.quora.com/q/qqylyzqgpwisoecc/What-is-the-Holy-Grail-of-programming-language-design So here’s a question. A dumb solution … But what if we created a system as a tower of […]
On Architecture and Modules
Another long Quora Answer Why is it important to agree on software architecture principles? In a sense, some of this is an update on my thinking on “modularity” (eg. ThoughtStorms:DecompositionByLanguageIsProbablyAModularityMistake Well, possibly it’s only important in an “organizational” sense. In that people in your team or project need to be aligned in their conception of […]
Which language is better for creating DSLs, Clojure or Haskell?
Another Quora answer. Part of my increasing admiration for the virtues of EDN in Clojure. Which language is better for creating DSLs, Clojure or Haskell? Clojure has a slightly different philosophy than most Lisps, I think. In Clojure you’d be more likely to make your “DSL” in EDN (“Extensible Data Notation”, which is a bit […]
Pharo and a new Smalltalk
On Quora, I’m often ranting about Smalltalk. And how I’d like to see a “clean-slate” reinvention. Much as Clojure is a clean-slate reinvention of Common Lisp. Over on this answer I was asked what I think of Pharo. My response veered off somewhat : I’ve had a quick look at Pharo. And it’s certainly quite […]