| As a life-long programmer, I've also wondered often about how we express human thought and ideas in(to) software. The process is lossy, as you put it, in that so much is lost in translation. On the other hand, it's also "enriching" in that software can (or must) define the concrete details of models and logic that were missing in the source (human thought). > ..another way to express a higher level thought other than language? If software development is the modelling ("theory building") of higher-level human thought (often ambiguous or ill-defined) into textual source code in a programming language.. The answer may come from the "language environment", richer features in an IDE/editor that integrate with the compiler and the abstract syntax tree. When you mentioned "projections", I thought about how text is one of many possible perspectives into a program. I can imagine other representations, perhaps UML-like, that an editor could provide as a view mode - that would allow exploring the models and logic flow of a program visually. Another aspect I think of, is that programming is a collaborative process that almost always involves people with domain-specific knowledge outside of programming. It could be that the biggest information loss occurs not in the encoding/programming, but in the (cross-cultural) communication between these spheres of thought. ..Which seems to imply that there ought to be developed a shared language - or conceptual framework - between experts in software development and those outside of it. A shared language/framework would allow the encoding to happen at a higher-level of abstraction, collaboratively - instead of one side encoding in (vague) human language, then the other side encoding in (precise) programming language. My line of thought keeps returning to something like interactive UML diagrams that can be developed together by all stake-holders. Ideally, these would be living diagrams that are directly used by the software itself, to generate database schema, internal models/classes, control flow.. But I'm skeptical whether "visual programming" as a paradigm is the answer, mainly because there have been countless unsatisfying attempts. I find inspiration in the works of people like Seymour Papert ¹, Alan Kay ², Bret Victor ³, who challenge our existing notions of what programming is and could be. A common thread among them is the focus on interface and environment, how textual representation of software is only one of many possible perspectives, that there's room for innovation in how we interact, explore, develop and communicate about software. A vital part of that is including "non-programmers", the rest of the world, in the development process. I'm fond of the Whole Code Catalogue ⁴, and what the Future of Coding initiative is doing. I think this area of investigation is an important one, to continue to attempt to bridge the gap between human thought and software. ¹ http://papert.org/ ² http://www.vpri.org/work/our_work.htm ³ http://worrydream.com/#!2/LadderOfAbstraction ⁴ https://futureofcoding.org/catalog/ |