I have a new law to go along with Conway's: Organizations or individuals that produce content... are constrained to distribute said content in formats that mirror the tools used to create it.
For example, a person using the Pages application on a Mac might be inclined to distribute their writings via PDF using Mac-typical fonts utilizing Apple-inspired layout and formatting options. You know, instead of just making a web page or using a web publishing tool.
Despite the annoying format I did read the PDF and while I like the sentiment I can't help but think it's a lot of wishful thinking. People have been trying to make visual programming tools (i.e. tools with real-time positive and negative brain feedback loops) for a very long time now and they always come up short.
Viewing the labor of programming in real-time makes sense though and I think we can get there for a lot of use cases. Taking advantage of the web and interpreted languages (e.g. Python) or instant-compiling languages (e.g. Go) is probably how we'll do it.
The opposite of progress in this area would be utilizing extremely verbose languages like Java or C# or languages that require a lot of preprocessing and/or compiling and/or complicated build and deployment processes. Java has got to be the worst here with slow startup times, complicated and (often extremely time-consuming) deployment processes... And that's just for the IDE! Haha
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I have a new law to go along with Conway's: Organizations or individuals that produce content... are constrained to distribute said content in formats that mirror the tools used to create it.
For example, a person using the Pages application on a Mac might be inclined to distribute their writings via PDF using Mac-typical fonts utilizing Apple-inspired layout and formatting options. You know, instead of just making a web page or using a web publishing tool.
Despite the annoying format I did read the PDF and while I like the sentiment I can't help but think it's a lot of wishful thinking. People have been trying to make visual programming tools (i.e. tools with real-time positive and negative brain feedback loops) for a very long time now and they always come up short.
Viewing the labor of programming in real-time makes sense though and I think we can get there for a lot of use cases. Taking advantage of the web and interpreted languages (e.g. Python) or instant-compiling languages (e.g. Go) is probably how we'll do it.
The opposite of progress in this area would be utilizing extremely verbose languages like Java or C# or languages that require a lot of preprocessing and/or compiling and/or complicated build and deployment processes. Java has got to be the worst here with slow startup times, complicated and (often extremely time-consuming) deployment processes... And that's just for the IDE! Haha