This was initially part of my explanation for why people should be interested in 'syntax free' programming, but I decided to separate it. Here is the original essay.
Aliens have landed on earth. One of their computer scientists has been speaking with one of our own. They understand each for the most part, at high levels of abstraction—but they find plenty of discrepancies in the details. Now the alien is trying to grok how our programming tools work:
Alien: I understand that you have added abstractions over your 'machine code' because people find it unmanageable to build systems in a binary alphabet—but I don't see how your programmers interact with the abstractions, how they specify which they would like to use.
Human: Okay, I think I see what you mean. Well, whenever we write programs, it is in a particular 'programming language'; this language contains a set of abstractions which a programmer is free to choose from and use how they'd like. Each language assigns names to its abstractions; so the programmer types the abstraction's name in order to use it.
Alien: Alright. Maybe I do understand then—it's not so different at home: we don't usually type out the name, but we might say it out loud, or reach our hand toward it, if we see it on the 'program construct' list. I'm curious, though, after you have typed the name of an abstraction, how does this update the 'machine code' for the program you're building?
Human: Well, it's not usually just one name that has been typed, but there's a whole 'document'—just like we talked about for email, or academic papers. This document is then 'parsed,' which is a way of converting the document into a 'model': a form suitable for a running program to interact with—the program being a 'compiler' in this case. So, once the document is parsed—if it was well-formed—the compiler uses the resulting model as a basis for generating machine code.
Alien: I understand what you mean by 'parsing'—we have something similar, too. But this seems strange to me that you would involve something as complex as inferring semantics through syntax in order to update the model of your program. You mean to tell me that in order to change a single part of a program's model, you must use a document editor, find the part of the document that corresponds the part of the model you want to change, recall from memory all of the abstractions available, type out the replacement abstraction's name one character at a time, and re-parse the changed document!? Just to change one thing in the model!? You guys must be much better programmers than us after all; that would be far too difficult for us: we need to see which abstractions are valid to use at different times, and when we replace one, or add a new one—or anything like that—the program's model is updated directly, which lets our software give feedback on how to proceed.
Human (grinning and slicking hair back, then shrugging): well, it's not too hard: we've gotten really good at automating parsing, and our programming tools have document editors built in. But yeah... I guess we are pretty good!
(In case it's not obvious: the aliens were the better programmers.)
No comments:
Post a Comment