Programming Through Pictures Part II

The RDF Interest group recently had a couple of links with this which fit in with my previous post.

Before there was XDE, UML and ACE there was intentional programming. I guess it was '95 MS was happy and carefree having just shipped a new version of Windows. Everything was right in the world, they could do anything. Including representation that never dies:

"Software encoded intentionally can be said to be immortal, in that its meaning can be sustained independently of the long term progress in programming notation and implementation techniques."

http://www.research.microsoft.com/scripts/pubs/view.asp?TR_ID=MSR-TR-95-52

The analogies being used reminded me a lot of musical notation:
http://www.research.microsoft.com/scripts/pubs/view.asp?PubID=229

Eidola is a similar type of project which seeks to get around textual representation of code because:
* It presents many features of program structure poorly, particularly large-scale structure.
* It unnecessarily ties the fundamental design of the language to its human presentation.
* It privileges one form of a program over all others, and that form happens to make it particularly inconvenient for software to work with the semantic structure of a program.
* It creates translation messes for alternate visual presentations and storage formats.
* It creates a very high barrier to entry for creative new developer tools of any real sophistication.

At least it would get rid of the eternal curly brace debate:
http://eidola.org/notation/gallery/eidola/fibranibrace.shtml

They even have a 0.0.0 release:
http://eidola.org/