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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

Paradigm shift will occur, when we will deploy neuromechanisms allowing to directly interact with the brain. Pictures are more natural representation for our mind, so we probably will live in some super-unicode environment. No need to stick with ASCII, no need to encode "while" operator with those 5 latin letters, just some fun picture and that's all. Or may be block schemas will live again or modified block schemas. They are difficult to use with current input methods. Even with mouse it takes a lot of time to scroll and zoom big picture. And with neurointerface, when computer will show you exactly what you want in exactly millisecond you though about it, block schemas might be just perfect representation for imperative programming language. Classes might be represented in some kind of UML diagram or another similar approach.

That would be really fun time to program.

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How does this work if 2 or more people are working on the same program? I then have to understand what other people's pictures mean, so then not much has changed: you still have to learn the meaning of symbols, but those symbols are pictures rather than words.

In terms of representing structure with pictures, there is a further weakness in that many problems can't be neatly represented in a diagram because they have more than 3 dimensions to them.

I think you basic point still stands though: I'm sure we could be more effective about how we navigate around code and express ourselves to the computer.

I think you're sort of on to something with how the change will come when we have a true major paradigm shift in programmimg. We're not anywhere near that though.

Text and programming languages: It ain't pretty but it isn't broken so don't fix it.

The futurist in me thinks the following: in a 100 years programs will program themselves. We'll just need a reliable way to tell them what to program.

Great news, The Future is here already! These reliable methods for telling computers what to compute are known as Programming Languages.

The closest paradigm to what I was trying to imply are more general purpose declarative languages. Something like sql or rich logic libraries that let the developer describe the desired result rather than the 'how.' Now advance this by 100 years, and I would hope anyone can program arbitrarily complex things by using graphical/natural-language tools to specify constraints, and then the 'program' arbitrarily generates the lower-level code.

So the future is Prolog?

It may be from the early 1970s, but compared to the mainstream programming languages of today, it still look pretty futuristic to me.

Aren't most things from the 70s? Did we get any serious new language tech since then? Tooling got nicer, runtimes faster - but the language breakthroughs?

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