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Quick, computer. Do something useful. |
On one side of the image: a programmer working hard to figure out what the heck all that code does. On the other side: a computer sitting idle, doing nothing but displaying text.
So. True.
I've long wondered why it is we insist on storing our code in unstructured text documents. ( I hope Google Script doesn't use raw text behind the scenes, but probably it does. )
The main rationales seem to be: diff, versioning, portability between tools, and the ability to store... well... jibberish.
The ability to store random text in a file -- even incorrect program code -- is interesting because sometimes programs don't compile, and that's okay. Can incorrect code be stored in a structured way? Assuming it did, now that it's the year 2013, perhaps we could stick images and diagrams directly into code. Additionally, comments are nice, but real metadata -- not just doxygen or javadoc markup -- would be really cool. As far as diff and versioning go: I'd be at least interested to see whether history of the sort photoshop, gimp, wikipedia, or google docs provides -- data which lets me see what a user did to change something, and not just the end result -- could replace diff satisfactorily. The portability of text is hard to beat, for sure. Is that really raw text's one killer feature?
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Blizzard's trigger editor |
I'm doubtful of any programming environment that forces me to use a mouse, and I'm curious how subtext's concept of "always executing" ( which was inspired by automatic spreadsheet calculations ) would map to concepts like "distance between NPC and it's target", but it's a thought provoking language.
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The Subtext editor |
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