Re: simple vs complex languages

Basile STARYNKEVITCH <basile@starynkevitch.net> writes:


>I really think it is a pity that no language offers a fancier
>interface than plain textual files, typed thru an editor. The syntax
>directed editors of the late 1980's are gone.


>[There have certainly been visual languages with spiffy editors to
>manage them. They don't seem to have solved any problems interesting
>enough for people to keep using them. -John]


Will, my 9-year-old son, programs his Lego robots with a purely visual
language. He creates and edits by dragging flowchart elements
(representing subroutines, logical constructs or variables) to a
flowchart. He sets variables and subroutine parameters in a dialog box
associated with the variable or subroutine.


The subroutine library (that is, set of supplied flowchart "building
blocks") is quite rich, and well designed for its purpose. There are
no floating point operations, but at the granularity of a Lego robot,
three-place fixed point is more than adequate.


On a hunch, I discovered that the program is saved as a C-like text
file. Being a dinosaur, I find it easier to program the robots by
editing the text file.


One interesting difference: His programs never have lexical, syntactic
or semantic errors; the nature of the programming language he's using
precludes it. His programs rarely have logic bugs; if they do, he can
quickly find them and fix them.


My programs, on the other hand, have lexical, grammatical, syntactic,
semantic and logical errors at about the usual rate of a casual
programmer. There's no debugger, but I find debuggers (beyond stack
traces) a distraction anyway.


--
dhs spencer@panix.com

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