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A comment on Ask HN: More “experimental” UIs for editing/writing code?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: More “experimental” UIs for editing/writing code? by watercooler_guy on Sunday August 07, 2022 @03:29AM (#32374631)
That’s a really neat idea, what better way to intuitively understand what a program is doing than a familiar physical environment in front of you.

Reminds me of the esolang Taxi, where you perform computation by giving directions to a taxi driver carrying “passengers” (data) around a city [1]

The city metaphor would probably create a whole new genre of software-art too, where you can optimize for beautiful layout/architecture as well as efficiency.

[1] https://bigzaphod.github.io/Taxi/

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Re:Ask HN: More “experimental” UIs for editing/writing code? by tjchear on Sunday August 07, 2022 @10:13AM (#32376618)
This is really neat. I like your thinking that it could create a whole genre of software-art. I see it as being very plausible as I'm sure engineers worth their salt have seen poetic charm or elegance in expression of some of their codes.

It'd be great if a program's city metaphor by virtue of the rules (similar to Python's indentation rules) give rise to efficient/beautiful architectures. For example, for obvious reasons, buildings close to each other enjoy in-memory proximity and thus cache locality induced performance improvements.

[ Parent | on HN ]