Gerhard Fiedler wrote:
> Timothy J. Weber wrote:
> 
>> No artillery coming from here.  I think a HUGE amount of what we do is
>> simply because of tradition - specifically the tradition of punch cards.
> 
> Definitely -- and it's not because of lack of ideas; see eg.
> <http://www.literateprogramming.com/>. (Last time I checked this site, the
> colors weren't that awful. Currently I see a light yellow background with
> black text and white [!] headers...)

Yeah, what happened there?!

But yes, I remember when I first heard the idea that "you write programs 
for human readers, not for the compiler," and it was an epiphany.

>> Of course, transitioning would be hard 
> 
> Not necessarily. Using your RTF or HTML (WYSIWYG) editor of choice and a
> preprocessor that copies only the code part (easily parsed) into a temp
> file that gets fed to the compiler or assembler, this could probably be
> integrated rather easy with most languages. Bad thing is that none of the
> IDEs would work with this, so if you're hooked onto an IDE that's not for
> you.

Yes... and IDEs can speed things up a lot, especially around managing 
the tremendous and fast-changing vocabulary one always needs for any 
given project.  So perhaps a custom IDE would be needed.

But mostly, I think it would be hard to convince other programmers - 
team members, future team members, management...  That's not always 
necessary, of course, if you ARE management, or you are 100% of the team.
-- 
Timothy J. Weber
http://timothyweber.org
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