The Beauty of Unreal

Further to my recent post on example-centric programming, Tony responded with

I entirely agree with the audience targeting critique you make. I was thinking about the historical roots of programming, the social aspects, and how they must be considered, not just for fuzzy artsy reasons but for because they are part of the sociology of skills and attitudes that mold the field (we are the medium of programming).

I think programming has strong roots in telephony and in code-breaking and
in mathematics. These roots influence the need for interfacing at the hardware level,
efficiency and high abstraction.

The PC revolution is in a way an extension of the business view of data processing, which was very much separate from the scientific programming done on mini-computers. In fact now that I think of it, this may be why DEC missed the boat on PC's - PC's are for business and now are appliances, not really computers - but data processors (ironic given the PDP name - there's a story there...).

So what this guy is advocating is a reconciliation of these two worlds, a wrapper view. Not sure that can fly in social terms, for the reasons you identify, and because we have two worlds in software, the programming in the old telephony-coding=math sense and the data processing view with forms, HTML, windows and high-level object libraries.

Alan Kay's deep thoughts on similar topics are here:

I hadn't really thought about the two ends of programming like that before. I guess there are two cultures. Part of my confusion is from watching his SubText video, where he shows how it works. Although it meets all the aims in the manifesto (text-is-a-dead-end, don't-copy-and-paste, avoid-control-flow), the feel of video is very mathematical. It feels like LISP programming with recursion. Recursion is a strange concept to most people; like postfix notation. In this way SubText (as it exists in the video) is a failure for end-user programming. Ordinary users will prefer 10 PRINT "HELLO" style of programming.
Perhaps he can take SubText into more of a wrapper thing that works at the component level. Who was that guy in the 1980s -- Brad Cox, who talked about software ICs. Connect up the output of this algortithm to that report view...

Speaking of "Language Matters" and "It's usability, stupid", have a look at the Unreal Tournament Engine. It's become that gaming engine of choice for lots of top games. A very clean design with a virtual machine and a simple language, but extended with a few key gaming features, like states.

Unreal Engine architecture