Video Programming

[maxm]

"Ron Stephens" <rdsteph at earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:3C2E89DD.F3304EA9 at earthlink.net...

> Please forgive me for this rambling post, but there it is, food for
> thought, or for speculation, or for...???

You are certainly not the first to think of this. The problem is that
graphics takes up too much screen estate. Also it is hard to make
meaningfull metaphors and icons on a large system.

Imagine if your windowed computer only had icons and no text. It would be
extremely hard to navigate it, and find a specific piece of data. On the
other hand it would not be a problem to navigate a windowed computer with no
icons, but only words.

It sort of the same problem one has when designing websites. Those icons and
small graphics snippets gives a feel, and can enhance memory, but the words
are what is really important.

Zooming in and out of 3D graphics is also a nice idea, but actually it is
allready implemented in Python. It's called function and classes, which does
essentially the same thing.

Imagine how an object oriented databse would look on screen in 3D graphics.
And then compare with:

odb = Odb() # pretty simple representation after all isn't it?

Also the number of errors rises exponentially with the amount of logic
outside the visible screen area. this would be a problem when graphics takes
up much more screen estate than text.

A language like Python is actually pretty effecient in conveying it's
meaning and logic.

A graphical interface shines in small specialized domains like
image-processing, layout, text-processiing etc. Not in general programming.

No I believe what is needed is a better programming enviroment or ide if you
please. It should teach you the language while using it, and it should make
it easy to make self documenting code.

Now that would be a great new invention!

regards Max M