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Blog Post: Manifesto of the Programmer Liberation Front

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mouser:
Manifesto of the Programmer Liberation Front
Filed under: General — Jonathan Edwards @ 10:04 am
Compared to every other field of design and engineering, programming is an embarrassment and a failure. The “software crisis” has dogged us from almost the beginning. We who have made programming our life will no longer tolerate this.
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http://alarmingdevelopment.org/index.php?p=5




from CodingHorror.com blog

mouser:
my view is that dramatic changes in the ease of use of modular components may be much of the solution.

Rover:
I think these guys might be smoking crack.

Their unsupported assertion is that the perfect way to write programs is through a visual interface.  A psudo point-and-click or drag-and-drop answer.

Programming deals with a lot of abstract stuff.  I'm not sure that the best way logic flows can be described is visually. 

 :two:

mouser:
where do they say visual interface is the perfect solution.  all i see is this:

Visual languages are not the solution
Prior and ongoing attempts to evolve beyond textual programming have focused on Visual Programming. The common idea is to replace AST structures with some form of graphical diagram. While well-intentioned, nothing compelling has yet resulted from this approach, and it is widely seen as a failure. The reason may be that it does not go far enough, merely substituting a different surface representation for the same old semantics (and generally retaining even the surface syntax of names). These semantics are highly evolved to suit textual representations, so it is not a surprise that merely altering the surface representation does not help. We need to simultaneously rethink both the syntax and the semantics of programming languages to break out of the current deadlock.
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Rover:
Text is a dead-end

Programming is stuck in an evolutionary dead-end: the use of character strings to encode programs. Every other computer-mediated form of expression has evolved beyond text into sophisticated WYSIWYG interfaces to complex data structures. For example, no one still uses textual markup for word processing (except, notably, Computer Scientists with TeX). We need WYSIWYG programming.
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