Eidola - Programming Without Representation

Lightborn writes: "From the Web site: "Eidola is a representation-independent, object-oriented, visual programming language. Eidola is an experiment which takes a wild new approach to the structure and representation of programming languages. Traditional programming languages are heavily tied to their representation as textual source code, which is unfortunate -- text is a very poor notation system for the concepts of a high-level language. An Eidola program, however, exists independent of any representation; its "fundamental" form is as a set of carefully defined mathematical abstractions."" We're confused, yet intrigued.

Comments

This is an old, good idea

[woggo]

I've yet to read the semantics document, so I won't comment on the language itself. However, the idea of multiple representations for a single program is a good idea both from a philosophical standpoint (a la Wittgenstein -- "to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life" -- so allow different forms of expressing a program), and from an engineering standpoint. In the latter arena, Eidola mimics the venerable ancestor of Scheme and Pascal, Algol 68, which allowed users to construct their own grammar for the language's constructs (an early attempt at i18n!); also, it could allow Literate Programming with great facility.

Re:Use of Text

[joss]

> Maybe I'm just old fashioned . . .
not at all.

They are the old fashioned ones. Hey language is inefficient... lets go back to scratching pictures in the dirt or hieroglyphics on the wall in order to communicate.

This visual programming crap crops up from time to time because so many people are brainwashed by that crap about a picture being worth a 1000 words. Draw me a picture of "misguided".

Programming is done with languages because programming is communication. It's communication between programmer and computer.

This is also the reason why the GUI monkeys can never understand the power of a gcommand line. The command line is a language. They are stuck on the "pictures are better than words" meme. Yeah, true, they are, until you learn to read that is.

Visual stuff, GUIs, languages etc, are more *intuitive* in the same way that picture books are more intuitive to babies. It doesn't mean they are superior. This is why the best interfaces are a combination of GUI and language. It's just like the way you give children picture books while they are learning to read.

Eidola scare?

[KevinMS]

I though it was discovered that that person in canada didnt have Eidola?