It'd be interesting to look at some of the stuff Alan Kay talked about. With STEPS he was working on some interesting notions that might actually help here. The entire work they were doing with that was effectively based around creatign DSLs for whatever problem area they were working around at the time; GUI; hell, iirc they implemented TCP by writing a DSL taht was able to read the ASCII images and tables in the TCP RFC and use that to implement packages.
“The value of notation lies in how it enables us to work with new abstractions. With more powerful notation, we can work with ideas that would have been too complex or unwieldy without it. Equipped with better notation, we might think of solutions or hypotheses that would have been previously unthinkable. Without Arabic numerals, we don’t have long division. Without chess notation, the best strategies and openings may not have been played. Without a notation for juggling patterns called Siteswap, many new juggling patterns wouldn’t have been invented. I think notation should be judged by its ability to contribute to and represent previously unthinkable, un-expressible thoughts.”
This is pretty much the whole point of programming languages imo
It'd be interesting to look at some of the stuff Alan Kay talked about. With STEPS he was working on some interesting notions that might actually help here. The entire work they were doing with that was effectively based around creatign DSLs for whatever problem area they were working around at the time; GUI; hell, iirc they implemented TCP by writing a DSL taht was able to read the ASCII images and tables in the TCP RFC and use that to implement packages.
see also “Notational Intelligence” https://thesephist.com/posts/notation/
“The value of notation lies in how it enables us to work with new abstractions. With more powerful notation, we can work with ideas that would have been too complex or unwieldy without it. Equipped with better notation, we might think of solutions or hypotheses that would have been previously unthinkable. Without Arabic numerals, we don’t have long division. Without chess notation, the best strategies and openings may not have been played. Without a notation for juggling patterns called Siteswap, many new juggling patterns wouldn’t have been invented. I think notation should be judged by its ability to contribute to and represent previously unthinkable, un-expressible thoughts.”
This is pretty much the whole point of programming languages imo
Cool, this explains that idea of code as a tool for thinking in a really good way. Haven't read the whole post yet.