[dragonwriter]

> We don't, however, try to understand what "thought" is, and work backwards to form a representation of it.

Yes, we do. ML/AI is a moving target that literally represents the current SOTA in doing just that, and even symbolic logic itself is the outcome of an older, a priori, way of doing that. Actually, analytic diagrams are also an outcome of one approach to that. So, all programming methods you mention come from some effort to model thought and make a representation of that model.

[dmvaldman]

Perhaps I spoke too broadly. You're right, many disciplines try to understand thought. From CS to philosophy to neuroscience to psychology etc.

My real point is that thought is not visual or textual. Those things are simply ways of transmitting thoughts. When I have a thought, and I write it down, and you read it, I am simply hoping you are now having a thought related to the one I had. Some interaction in your brain is similar to the one in mine, when I had the thought. Civilization has spent a lot of time in mechanisms that correlate thoughts between people. Hence, language. Hence literacy. Etc.

Now we are trying to create a shared language between humans and computers, where we both understand each other with minimal effort.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Developer tools have always been biased towards text manipulation, and - in a Sapir-Whorf kind of a way - that has influenced which ideas are imaginable in computational languages.

Even the word "language" is biased towards text, or at least an atomic symbolic representation which is probably verbal.

I agree this is unimaginative, and probably naive. But dataflow/diagramatic systems tend to produce horrible messy graphs that are incredibly unwieldy for non-trivial applications. (My favourite anti-example is Max/MSP which is used for programming sound, music, and visuals. It's popular with visual artists, but its constructs map so poorly to traditional code that using it when you're used to coding with text is a form of torture.)

I think it's hard to do better, because human communication tends to be implicit, contextual, somewhat error prone, and signals emotional state, facts, emotional desires, or more abstract goals.

Computer communication lacks almost all of the above. Programming is a profoundly unnatural pastime that doesn't come easily to most of the population.

The fact that written languages and code both use text is very misleading. They don't use text in anything like the same ways, and code systems are brittle, explicit, and poor cousins of the formal theorem description used in math.

So the domains covered have almost no overlap. Coding is machine design, and human thought mostly isn't. It's hard to see how they can work together with minimal effort unless the machines explicitly include a model of human mental, emotional, and social states, in addition to the usual representations of traditional formal logic.

[wtetzner]

> Now we are trying to create a shared language between humans and computers, where we both understand each other with minimal effort.

The tricky part is that it needs to be a shared language between humans, computers, and other humans, if we want software to be maintainable.