[Edu-sig] re: Question about a programming system.

[Benjamin Fallenstein]

Hi Arthur,

Arthur_Siegel@rsmi.com wrote:
> >I think that for limited domains your approach makes a lot of sense.
> >Alice effectively does the same, mapping hierarchical menu choices to
> >Python statements -- but statements chosen from a limited domain.
> 
> One of those days.
> 
> Please Guido what does that mean?
> 
> Maybe compare it to something like VPython,  or Blender, or Lightflow or
> something
> like PovTalk "a Natural Language based 3D scene generator. By Stacey Verner."
> (still a live link from the edu-sig page)  which accomplishes a natural
> language instruction
> set with stunning graphics in a few kilobytes of Python/PyOpenGL.  And the code
> is accessible
> and explorable..

I can't say anything about Alice menuing yet (haven't found anything
related to it), but about PovTalk. (At least about the comparison to the
notes about my programming system experiment.) PovTalk let's you *key
in* statements in natural language, an approach that doesn't scale up
even to the simplest bit of programming. I don't say it's uninteresting;
it's fun to play around with; but it doesn't scale up in the least bit.

Why? Because you have to remember the subset of natural language used.
(Same problem in text adventures, which work only because they aren't
programming either.) It's not that hard if there are ten or twenty
symbols to remember. But if there are thousands and thousands of
symbols, it doesn't work.

Lightflow I haven't looked at in detail, but it seemes it generates Py
files from 3d scenes. That, of course, is not programming, but
describing something static in a programming language (akin to HTML).

In my system, on the other hand, you do actual programming (including
function definitions, conditionals etc.), but you assemble the
statements with the mouse. I guess that was what Guido meant about
Alice, though I haven't found docs about that yet. So that's what would
make it comparable. Comparable to e.g. PovTalk, I think it's not.

(The natural language thing is, in a way, just the presentation: my
system could show Python code just as well. However, the symbols will be
designed in a way so that they work well together with natural language.
And that may get in the way for more complex programming, as I can
imagine, and as I understood Guido.)

- Benja