This talk makes many good points in programming but also in general for the interaction with a machine. In particular is quite critical of “batch” programming. The difference between “batch” and “online” writing is crucial to TeXmacs, I think, so the message of the talk is also relevant to our community.
"Stop writing dead programs"
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I have trouble watching the video now.
Here is my opinion of programming in the point view of community:
Programming is like water or river, it changes from time to time. I think the container (the community) is the most important one! The container will build the shape of the water.
The video talks about the fact that our vision of what is writing programs is very conventional and that we rely mostly on “dead code”, that is files which are batch processes and long compilation cycles. It give some examples from the epoch where experimentation was more alive and people were trying and implementing new ways to interact and program a computer. It resonate with the features that I find important in TeXmacs vs. LaTeX: in TeXmacs we interact with an “alive” document, not with its “dead corpse”, macros can be created visually in a very effective way. (I do not believe in “visual” programming languages like Scratch, but TeXmacs macros can be visually constructed in a non-trivial way, and it is in my opinion a better tradeoff than Scratch-type interaction). I wanted to write a small essay about this in the blog to maybe inspire our community to pursue the goal of making document editing more “alive” even more, and at the same time avoid pitfalls like making it “childish” or downgrading the power to a small common denominator of possibilities, like most word-processing software, which do not have for example a powerful macro system like TeXmacs does, but only styling facilities.
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