Programming: The Desperate Losing Battle
Posted by Daniel Lyons Sat, 27 Oct 2007 22:53:00 GMT
Jonathan Edwards refused to participate in the much-vaunted Beautiful Code essay collection, saying on his blog:
“Telling an inspiring story about a beautiful design feels disingenuous. Yes, we all strive for beautiful code. But that is not what a talented young programmer needs to hear. I wish someone had instead warned me that programming is a desperate losing battle against the unconquerable complexity of code, and the treachery of requirements.”
You’ve probably never heard of this guy, but he is responsible for the most interesting development in programming languages in the past thirty years, Subtext. Subtext seems destined to be whispered about for decades before emerging as a powerful yet obscure influence on some future technology.
All good programming languages are based on an interesting principle or theory of computation. The best are those that obliterate an unnecessary barrier, usually between the language and the compiler and the resulting code. In the middle of the second Subtext video, Edwards reveals that Subtext is actually about directly manipulating the run-time structure of the code.
This is quite a departure. In fact, isn’t this the problem most people have with recursion? Visualizing and understanding the run-time structure of the code, namely the call stack?
Of course there are a plethora of other interesting benefits to Subtext; editing a run-time graph enables a lot more code sharing and less duplication. In the second video, you can see incredible simplification of refactoring. I’m also surprised at the excellent details of the GUI and how it all hangs together so well. It has all the hallmarks of being created by a great programmer philosopher. An underground hit.
It will be interesting to see what comes of this in the coming years.
