From: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Subject: Re: Typing Ada
Date: 25 May 88 05:53:56 GMT [thread overview]
Message-ID: <1017@cresswell.quintus.UUCP> (raw)
In-Reply-To: 25135.580491166@mbunix
In article <25135.580491166@mbunix>, munck@MITRE-BEDFORD.ARPA (Bob Munck) writes:
> People can "read"
> pictures better than words in a row; machines, until recently, couldn't
> do anything at all with pictures and could handle only very simple
> sequences of words (programming languages). I think it likely that Ada
> will be the LAST major one-dimensional programming language.
People can read *some* *small* pictures better than they can read text
conveying the same information. But it doesn't seem plausible to me that
a program which would have been say 50k lines of ADA would be easy to
follow as a collection of several thousand pictures. (Compare the
information density of a paperback detective story with the information
density of a comic.) I would like to see some evidence one way or the
other about the practicality of pictorial systems -vs- structured text
for non-trivial applications (e.g. if the whole thing can fit on a SUN
screen, forget it).
next prev parent reply other threads:[~1988-05-25 5:53 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 12+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
1988-05-10 16:28 Typing Ada Bob Munck
1988-05-24 3:51 ` Rick Conn
1988-05-24 15:32 ` Bob Munck
1988-05-24 23:06 ` Rick Conn
1988-05-25 16:49 ` Eugene N. Miya
1988-05-25 5:53 ` Richard A. O'Keefe [this message]
1988-05-25 16:57 ` Randy Neff
1988-05-26 14:14 ` Robert Eachus
1988-05-26 12:40 ` David Collier-Brown
1988-05-25 13:30 ` Roger Racine
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
1988-05-12 17:28 zellich
1988-05-20 12:51 Karl A. Nyberg
replies disabled
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox