this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2026
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Programming
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I fundamentally disagree with the idea that "programming sucks" but there are some neat thoughts and tools in there.
This bit in particular:
I've often thought about the idea that to an extent a programming syntax does not have to be married to a language. We could potentially have editors and syntaxes designed so that each developer can interact with the code in the syntax they're most comfortable with, independent of the language. I don't know how realisable this is, it may be underestimating how tightly coupled syntax and language is.
I'm not a big fan of graphical programming in general, but there are times when I would like it just for a single function or class, for signal processing or control systems or state machines. I usually think of this in terms of editor plugins or external code gen tools rather than whole environments. Although every code gen tool I've used to date sucks.
Decoupling language from syntax will not work because it's too hard (impossible?) to find a common denominator for all the languages and syntaxes, imo
Certainly for all. I was mostly thinking in terms of e.g. languages that (can) compile to LLVM, since you have the intermediate form already defined. But then languages layer quite a lot on top of LLVM in terms of abstractions and safety constraints that make it probably a bad intermediary even for that subset. Even just for one language, there must be something ~~fun~~useful that can be done just by viewing the same code with different syntaxes.