Will programming ever depart the land of text?
I loved this article on the divides between user and programmer cultures, but sharing it brought responses on the values of programmer culture. Every time I wonder publicly about programming interfaces, or worse, suggest that graphical interfaces might play a role, I provoke a small army of people who think text is a key strength of programming. Though they sometimes wander into IDEs, text editors and especially the command line are their critical tools.
Bruce Maxwell, Professor of Computer Science at Colby College, described the power that text provides:
I’ve watched student after student come to the same conclusion that editing the text file is faster and easier and more precise. I’m not imposing my 1980’s C preferences on them; they are discovering this anew for themselves.
It comes down to this: you can create nice, general graphics tools that will let you do a certain set of tasks in a certain design space. But as soon as you have a specific idea or concept or need that falls outside of those tasks or the design space, or you want more detailed control, you fall back to the most general tool of all: a text editor and a programming language.
He’s right.
I was amazed, the first few times I attended OSCON, that the deeply-felt arguments at lunch weren’t about programming languages or principles, but about editors (Vim vs. Emacs) and about shells. The divisions among different ways to reach your text crossed language boundaries, and even varied within organizations. (Well, at least those that hadn’t standardized on IDEs.)
Most programming languages, in all their many flavors, remain text-based even if the things they manipulate are not. The logic of the Web front end is built in text – HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, for all of their differences, are all text. I loved HyperCard’s ability to create interfaces through a GUI, but fell back to HyperTalk when I needed to create logic of my own. Excel offers a framework that mixes data and logic, but again, making it powerful means that there is a text-based programming language lurking in the background. I enjoyed tinkering with Prograph, and perhaps it has a future, but it was always tinkering.
Computing shifted from numbers to text early, allowing vastly larger numbers of people to participate. While there is still a place for people who effortlessly manipulate binary and hexadecimal numbers, the vast majority of programmers work in environments whose symbols are more familiar to humans. We use those symbols in complex ways that aren’t especially familiar to people used to more traditional forms of text, but it’s text.
Text buys developers more than flexibility. Text offers a meta-level of manipulation, of search and replace, of diffs, of annotation, and of integration with a wide variety of tools. You should never write code in Microsoft Word – but I have. A JavaScript console might seem like an odd addition to a graphical browser, but it gives programmers huge power. I’m cautious about changing code with regular expressions, but it has been useful from time to time. Text editors often become development environments all their own.
In his 1986 No Silver Bullet article, Fred Brooks wrote about the many visions for dealing with the complexity of programming that couldn’t quite get there. He argued that graphical programming environments were too limited – “software is very difficult to visualize” – and that “Nothing even convincing, much less exciting, has yet emerged from such efforts. I am persuaded that nothing will.” Brooks had similarly little hope for the “exploding
researches into better programming environments… by its very nature, the return from now on must be marginal.”
Brooks didn’t talk about the power of text. He was looking to the horizon for new technologies in that 1986 paper, and had spent years in text-based systems. I think, though, that the power of text is part of the “big-payoff problems were the first attacked, and have been solved: … uniform file formats so as to have uniform program interfaces, and generalized tools.”
I may dream of graphical interfaces for flow-based programming and similar approaches that make programming more approachable to people who aren’t primarily programmers. However, it’s clear that for most programmers, programming will involve using text to manipulate computer structures for a very long time to come.
Text may be an old silver bullet, but it’s an effective one, and one programmers keep finding new ways to use.