Ask Slashdot: Why Are We Still Writing Text-Based Code?

First time accepted submitter Rasberry Jello writes "I consider myself someone who 'gets code,' but I'm not a programmer. I enjoy thinking through algorithms and writing basic scripts, but I get bogged down in more complex code. Maybe I lack patience, but really, why are we still writing text based code? Shouldn't there be a simpler, more robust way to translate an algorithm into something a computer can understand? One that's language agnostic and without all the cryptic jargon? It seems we're still only one layer of abstraction from assembly code. Why have graphical code generators that could seemingly open coding to the masses gone nowhere? At a minimum wouldn't that eliminate time dealing with syntax errors? OK Slashdot, stop my incessant questions and tell me what I'm missing." Of interest on this topic, a thoughtful look at some of the ways that visual programming is often talked about.

Comments

Re:Power.

[Anonymous Coward]

EEs have been designing circuits with structural complexity at least as great as any software program, using graphical tools, all along.

As an EE I call complete bullshit on this. Other than simplistic circuits most modern electronics design is done just as software: textually. Ever heard of Verilog and VHDL? These have largely replaces schematics. You can't have a schematic for a modern complex IC. The schematic would cover a fairly large state like Florida for something like a SPARC T5 or Core i7. There are so many pathways that even labeling the lines would be problematic. The days of something like CS0 are over. VHDL supports structured naming. These days netlists for complex chips are huge.

The tools and techniques for IC design have changed to a more textual mechanism precisely because text is better at dealing with complex abstractions. Please don't tell us what EEs do if you aren't an EE.

Symbolic characters are on the decline.

[enos]

>surviving languages use symbols representing sounds
over a billion people have a few symbols with you...

Are you referring to the Asian languages that use Chinese characters?
  - Vietnamese used to be written in Chinese characters, it now uses the Latin alphabet.
  - Korean replaced Chinese characters with the phonetic Hangul 500 years ago.
  - Japanese has not one but two phonetic alphabets to go along with their Chinese characters. They mix all three together, and you can tell a passage is intended to be simple to understand when it will be all phonetic except the simplest of Chinese characters.
  - Even China simplified the traditional characters because they were deemed too hard to learn. School children are taught new Chinese characters via pinyin, a phonetic scheme that uses Latin characters. Since they don't have a phonetic system, when they borrow foreign words then they match the foreign pronunciation with the set of Chinese characters that have the closest pronunciation. The result is a mix of characters where some have their original symbolic meaning, and others that only stand in for their pronunciation. Think "what your name means in Chinese" party trick.
  - Typing Chinese characters usually means typing out the pronunciation and then selecting the character.

I think the point that symbolic characters are on the decline is very valid.