by dusted | 2025-07-26 07:44:13+00:00
of course I would have the variable name saved, but and I'd probably require the to be somewhat unique too, but I'd save them as metadata, and I'd let people decide how they want them presented, for exampled with regard to casing.

For example, a variable holding a.. users actions per second. Say I've set up my editor for camelcase, I'd type in userActionsPerSecond, the editor would save the metadata as user,actions,per,second. Another programmer prefers underlines, their editor presents it user_actions_per_second, and a third user prefers it space seperated, but with a box drawn around it to indicate it's one thing and it's presented [user actions per second] or whatever. I'd maybe add a comment as metadata to the variable too, the comment could easily be shown above the variable, just as it is today, but they can never get detached by someone adding another item between the comment and the variable. Some people would prefer no comments at all, others want them always visible, others want them visible on mouse over.. lots of options.

I know I _can_ have almost all I'm asking for, but the hoops we jump through to get them due to storing program descriptions (source code) as plain text directly, with no really good way to add additional information to it (see the many horrors we have with annotations in different languages, for instance javadoc where comments are abused to embed a different kind of language carrying metadata which is only incidentally coupled to what it tries to decorate).

Instead of doing tricks to separate content and presentation, it should be the default approach.

Our entire infrastructure, grown organically over the past what, 40+ years, arrange itself around individual bytes arranged in text files, arranged in folders.. And I get that thinking this must be the best and final form is easy, because, honestly, software development tooling and infrastructure is some of the best and most solid software ever written, no doubt because it's written by the people using it.

It's not like I've talked with god and come with a list of solutions to problems nobody is having, only that, while I'm not really dissatisfied, I've stumbled into this way of thinking about building programs, it's partly due to some brain damage I must have gotten from learning and thinking about lisp, and while lisp does lots of things wrong, it gave my brain this twist that the models we hold of how to do things can be very different from what we're used to.

I think it's worth at least once in a while, to put some ideas on the backburner and entertain ourselves by imagining other approaches other approaches than arranging individual characters in files, which is the lowest form of computer interaction you can imagine outside of writing bits and bytes directly into memory cells. And it's a bit ironic that as we do this very high-level, high abstraction work that is composing a program, using the most primitive interaction with the machine that's still available through user-programs: manipulation of the arrangement of bytes in files.

If you look at modern development, there's still a fairly noticeable part of it that's centered about ascii-art, either directly by hand, or by instructing the editor to do it, and there's a lot of procedure that's there not to describe programs, but to help derive the programs out of the source texts.