> Maybe, given the lens, I've not given Dijkstra a proper chance to demonstrate a more positive attitude, so I'm open to any suggestions of writings where he doesn't seem like such a grump.

Kinda hard to find where Dijkstra praised something (except Algol 60).

One funny example: he called FORTRAN "an infantile disorder", though he said this about the team behind it: "At that time this was a project of great temerity and the people responsible for it deserve our great admiration.".

On LISP: "LISP has jokingly been described as 'the most intelligent way to misuse a computer'. I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts."

Alan Kay on Dijkstra: "Arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-dijkstras."

Now that I think about it, and I don't know if this exists yet, but APL would probably very much benefit from having a Scratch-like or Factorio-like visual editor paired with a touch interface. You would drag and drop symbols, and long-pressing a symbol would popup its definition.

You could also probably do nice things with the symbol "icon blocks" themselves, and provide them with colors or different visualizations to convey different contextual meanings.

Oh, he would definitely hate it even more. It was too high-level for his taste.

What I would like to know is how he would bend Algol 60 if he had tablet with pencil that could evaluate it in real-time.

It's very strange to see handwriting lumped in with typewriting, to be described as limited relative to screens! Iverson notation was a 2D format (both in handwriting and typeset publications) making use of superscripts, subscripts, and vertical stacking like mathematics. It was linearized to allow for computer execution, but the designers described this as making the language more general rather than less:

> The practical objective of linearizing the typography also led to increased uniformity and generality. It led to the present bracketed form of indexing, which removes the rank limitation on arrays imposed by use of superscripts and subscripts.

(https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/APLDesign.htm)

I think this is more true than they realized at that time. The paper describes the outer product, which in Iverson notation was written as a function with a superscript ∘ and in APL became ∘. followed by the function. In both cases only primitive functions were allowed, that is, single glyphs. However, APL's notation easily extends to any function used in an outer product, no matter how long. But Iverson notation would have you write it in the lower half of the line, which would quickly start to look bad.

We might also consider letting the language semantics invade the editor. Hazel integrates its parser into the text editor, so rather than getting a red squiggly when you break a rule you're just unable to break the rules. It represents code you haven't yet written as a "typed hole" so instead of

    1 +

The + would cause the following to appear

    1 + <int>

where <int> is the typed hole, reminding you to put an expression there which is an integer. It's perhaps a smaller leap than using shapes and space, but it's one I'd like to feel out a bit sometime.

I've long been fascinated by this question, probably spurred on by having read Hermann Hesse's _The Glass Bead Game_ (originally published as _Magister Ludi_) when I was impressionably young.

The problem of course is: ``What does an algorithm look like?''

Depicting one usually directs one into flowchart territory, and interestingly efforts at that style of programming often strive for simplicity, e.g., the straight-down preference from Raptor or Drakon --- systems which do not implement that often become a visual metaphor for ``spaghetti code'':

https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/

https://scriptsofanotherdimension.tumblr.com/

As a person who uses: https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/ and https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor a fair bit, and needs to get Ryven up-and-running again (or to fix the OpenSCAD layer in his current project or try https://www.nodebox.net/ again), this is something I'd really like to see someone be successful with, but the most successful exemplar would be Scratch, which I've never seen described as innovatively expressive --- I'd love to see such a tool which could make a traditional graphical application.

All those things can be specified in text. Fortress was a language that had the facility to use mathematical notation. Turned out to be not so compelling iirc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_(programming_language...

We do have syntax highlighting these days. And our editors work like hypertext, where I can go to definitions, find usages, get inheritance hierarchies etc. Quite a ways from your suggestion, but also a few steps removed from a type writer.

I think any such leap would have to be a really big one to catch on though, due to inertia. Colorforth is not exactly popular, and I can't think of any other examples.

We already did, it's natural language. Talk to your computer and get code, aka vibe coding.

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Is this an instance of the maxim that one has to be twice as smart to debug code as to write it?

Are you aware of any APL programs written using Literate Programming?

Apparently there was at least one attempt:

Lee J. Dickey. Literate programming in APL and APLWEB. APL Quote Quad, 23(4):11–??, June 1, 1993. CODEN APLQD9. ISSN 0163-6006.

Perhaps that additional layer of documentation would help? (APL is a language I've always been fascinated by, but never had occasion to more than superficially examine)

Yup, impossible to read. I was a paid APL coder in the early 80's. We called it WORN: Write Once, Read Never.

How so?

I'm struggling to see how Roger's manipulation of the expressions without executing each line validates Dijkstra's point...

I would assume it was intended humorously.

Read the sources carefully. Fortran quote is not his; he quoted it. Also remember that he was talking about pre-Fortran77 era. F77 tried to fix some of the criticisms though did not succeed fully. Here is a nice dig-in about the quote https://limited.systems/articles/dijkstra-fortran/

Another note to remember that John Backus, the team lead of the Fortran gang, was in the Algol committee. So these folks knew what they are talking about and spoke to each other periodically. Even John Backus said, Fortran is not the final interface that we should have.

It keeps spinning in the programming circles half-quoted versions of half-baked quotes from original sources. These pioneers, even when they disagreed, had pretty precise arguments and very rarely feeling the feelies.

He liked to be able to reason about programs without running them. He preferred simpler languages because they contain less irrelevant noise which got in the way of that.

I don't find this observation of Djikstra's to be one of his best. If there is a gadget that does a thing that no other gadget does, what does it even mean for the interface to be "terrible?" How can you even know if the interface is terrible, given that a better one has yet to be invented? Maybe the interface is as good as it can be for the tool in question.

I also don't love your mapping of this observation onto modern LLMs. The interface of an LLM is natural language text, along with some files written in plain text or markdown. Can it be improved? Undoubtedly! But as a baseline, it doesn't seem half bad to me. If it is so terrible, it should not be hard to propose an interface that will be significantly more productive. Can you?

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