Any reason why we don’t have a visual tool that builds an AST?
I know that there have been a lot of insultingly bad visual tools. And I totally get why we often use text. And most of us are comfortable in our own IDE or what not setups.
But if you honestly take a step back, we’re trying to mimic a more graphical approach in text- curly braces, syntax highlighting, identation, etc.
I think the world is missing out on entire categories of folks who could be programming while we debate curly braces vs indentation and whether semi-colons are a good thing or not.
In the near future, will they look back and laugh?
Comments
Any reason why we don’t have a visual tool that builds an AST?
I know that there have been a lot of insultingly bad visual tools. And I totally get why we often use text. And most of us are comfortable in our own IDE or what not setups.
But if you honestly take a step back, we’re trying to mimic a more graphical approach in text- curly braces, syntax highlighting, identation, etc.
I think the world is missing out on entire categories of folks who could be programming while we debate curly braces vs indentation and whether semi-colons are a good thing or not.
In the near future, will they look back and laugh?
Do you mean something like Scratch/Snap!?
https://scratch.mit.edu/
https://snap.berkeley.edu/