regan

Great points!

1) To me, security goes hand in hand with your point on mental models. It's hard enough to imagine how a bad actor might abuse a simple system you know well. Scale that up to a complicated system that no one understands and you've got a real problem.

2) Absolutely. For one, I'd want UI separated from data and logic such that you can easily tie programs together Unix-style.

Today, programs have a hard time interfacing with each other. And portability is nasty too. Maybe we could make the _ideas_ behind a program portable?

People quote “Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” But has this ever really been true? Take any function in your codebase and imagine you were asked to explain it to a friend. Does what's written out in code resemble even remotely what you'd say to them, draw out, or demonstrate? If the representation were good enough, you could just lift out the key idea and add it to your program.

3) I've used LabView a little, and it does kind of suck. Probably because they focused on making the logic itself be visual. When I think about merge sort, I "see" the recursion and merges, with chunks of the list flying around as the stages unfold. I don't see a flow chart or a circuit diagram. I'd bet most people do something similar.

Really, code is a pretty reasonable way to write out program logic. What we're missing is that visual intuition behind it, that mental model we force people to build up imperfectly.

Blows my mind. What sorts of optimizations can you do in assembly better than a good C compiler could?

I'm wondering what % performance improvement he saw from doing it this way.