CSAIL Event Calendar: Previous Series

Dangerous Ideas Seminar

Speaker: Jonathan Edwards , MIT CSAIL
Date: April 21 2005
Time: 1:00PM to 2:00PM
Location: D449 Kiva
Host: Tevfik Metin Sezgin

Contact: Tevfik Metin Sezgin, 617-253-2663, mtsezgin@csail.mit.edu
Relevant URL: http://projects.csail.mit.edu/dangerous-ideas/dangerous/www/

Representing programs as text strings makes programming harder then it has to be. The source text of a program is far removed from its behavior. Bridging this conceptual gulf is what makes programming so inhumanly difficult – we are not compilers. Subtext is a new medium in which the representation of a program is the same thing as its execution. Like a spreadsheet, a program is visible and alive, constantly executing even as it is edited. Edits are coherent semantic transformations. Notably absent from Subtext are syntax and names, the workhorses of textual languages. But neither is Subtext a visual programming language that replaces text with diagrams. Text and diagrams become user-interface techniques for the display of an abstract semantic model. The fundamental mechanism of this model is copying within trees. The simple idea of copying turns out to generate a rich model of both computation and the programming process itself.

For the last 50 years, programming language design has largely been about ever more abstract and clever ways to encode programs into text strings. This approach has constrained programming tools to be tarted-up text editors, while increasing the cognitive burden on the programmer. To make programming fundamentally easier, we need to transcend text. This is a dangerous idea because it implies that much of the technology of programming needs to be rethought. It also threatens to let normal humans be programmers.

Relevant URL(S): http://subtextual.org/

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