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- Hacker News
- Notational programming explored this, also with quantum computing, except the spatial notation was interleaved in a well-established 1d language (Python): https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3526113.3545619by fatso784
- https://esolangs.org/wiki/Category:Two-dimensional_languages
What I was looking for was actually "Piet":
- > We don’t really see 3-arity functions written in infix notation much.
Would a better example be Python's inline if else construction?
x = 3 if thing else 4 - λ-2D: An Exploration of Drawing as Programming Language, Featuring Ideas from Lambda Calculus [0]
One can use intensional calculus concepts to model non-lambda languages[3]. A live 'CoC'[6] / rocq[7] layer to hightlight/note 'correctness' issues (auotmated suggestion of proof of correctness/unresolved ANTLER freevars take on ast editors 'valid' language statement(s)/language block(s))
ast editor with gui nodes (panograph[1]) / code block with "user shape" construction using 3DILG[2]?
3d bar codes could be taken as a 'multi-statement' token.
Piet[4][5] programming language might be more useful than 3d barcode as langauge token though (condensed spreadsheet).
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[0] : https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/2d-an-exploration-of-draw...
[1] : https://github.com/jeprinz/pantograph/blob/main/README.md
[2] : https://1zb.github.io/3DILG/
[3] : [video] Beyond Lambda-Calculus: Intensional Computation calculus : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49067361
[4] : piet examples : https://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet/samples.html
[5] : esolang Piet : https://esolangs.org/wiki/Piet
[6] : calculus of constructions : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_of_constructions
[7] : rocq : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocq
by sargstuff - I was recently spending the last few days pondering how I would program in pen and paper if there were no technical restrictions other than having to define the program.
I just started note taking by hand and I find it way more enjoyable than typing. So maybe it’s a medium to force myself to code like in the old days.
I was looking for something like spatial computing and all I could find were esolangs, UML, and maybe punchcards? This gives me an idea on how this could be useful.
by DanielVZ - A use case for unicode bidirectional algorithm[1] at language implimentation level.
(vs. more traditioinal abstraction/logic level planes & normal to plane concepts: apl - hide it all in the language; spreadsheet - hide nothing/any information at any abstraction level is displayable[2][3][4][5]6])
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[1] Unicode bidirectinal algorithm : https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/
[2] spreadsheet : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet
[3] sc-im - an ncuses spreadsheet program for the terminal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24318367
[4] Excel as a Turing-complete functional programming environment : https://eusprig.org/wp-content/uploads/2309.00115.pdf
[5] lambda the ultimate excell worksheet function : https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/lambda-the-ult...
[6] escher circuits : https://esoteric.codes/blog/escher-circuits-using-vision-to-...
by sargstuff - > Cube is a three-dimensional, visual, statically typed, higher-order logic programming language, designed to be used in a virtual-reality-based programming environment. In this paper, we give an informal overview of the language and describe a prototype implementation.
- I didn't know this paper existed and I'm excited to devour this.
I've got my 3D glyph rendering system at glyph3d.dev, and use cases like this help accelerate layout and relationship development immensely. I greatly appreciate your sharing this!
Would you happen to have a trove of similar research or papers I could sponge off of you? Or maybe even a few minutes of your time in some chats / emails to discuss how these tools can be brought to a modern runtime?
by tikimcfee - Was this post prompted by this year’s ICFP competition?by pja
- in the same spirit, checkout Orca: https://100r.co/site/orca.html
It is used to compose songs. You can see the demo in the linked page.
by cavoirom - It is mentioned at the bottom of the page, but yeah Orca ia pretty good.by atoav
- This is cute, and it’s fine and fun to play around, but I don’t know, takes itself way too seriously or something. I apologize for being negative, but blowing my mind? No, not exactly. The attempt at the end to justify isn’t compelling to me and feels pretentious or something; the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (a misnomer according to the link) is about words and concepts, not about layout. This article fails to consider how to say or to read 2D code, or even think about why text is normally 1D. Language is expressed in one dimension because of time. We don’t speak in 2D, because we can’t, therefore we don’t write in 2D. We do visualize parse trees as trees (2D pictures) all the time, which isn’t mentioned. Also not mentioned are all the massive downsides of trying to write & edit & maintain 2D code, as well as the fact that we have good ways to write 3+ argument functions in 1D.
Nitpick - the andFlip function is wasting a whole dimension with unnecessary lines, and also modifying its input argument unnecessarily (yuck!), and it takes 3 arguments as an array for no good reason.
Better: andFlip = lambda a,b,c : not c if (a and b) else c
Except this is really just a normal 2 argument ternary, it does nothing interesting with a or b individually, it treats them as a unit, so I’d argue this shouldn’t even be a function.
by dahart - Isn't all code 2d, what comes above and what's below matters in code, it isn't even necessarily a straight line, gotos are like teleportation or fast travel points, recursion is pretty interesting.
I had difficulty reading large blocks of text when younger partly dyslexia I found out about much later, but mostly just overwhelming to look at. Then I learnt how to think of code as checkpoints, paths and basically a 2d map in a sense.
It helped me get used to huge walls of text. Maybe since we now have AI we can do some fun stuff in this direction since human ergonomics for writing code matter less than making code fun to read so that we can read and validate massive AI code.
Would be a fun experiment now that I think about it, I guess I found what I am doing tomorrow.
by minraws - "All this time we’ve been writing expressions in 1D space, but what happens when we unlock an extra dimension?"
Text is a serialization of an n-dimensional work space. "N-dimensional" doesn't have a formal definition I'm aware of but the major characteristic of it is that a new dimension can pop up anywhere. If you feel like you want to double-click on that, you can see my earlier comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35096647
A conventional textual language can represent everything mentioned there, whereas 2D layouts struggle almost immediately to represent things that textual layouts represent quite easily.
It can still be a useful "see the world differently" exercise, but it's the opposite of "freeing your mind"... it's stepping into a fairly small subset of functionality, albeit an unconventional one, and seeing what you can still manage to do even so. Rather than "unlocking a new dimension" it's actually throwing away n-2 of them. The experience of using this for any period of time would reveal this, as it would be a constant struggle to represent even very simple algorithms in this format.
I post this mostly because of the "familiarity breeds contempt" effect that programmers seem to get hit with for text. There is a reason we use text and it's not lack of imagination or being stuck in our ways... it is actually an incredibly rich and powerful format that poses a serious challenge for any alternative to overcome because of the astonishing combination of compactness combined with representational power.
by jerf - Code is natively tree like and hyperbolic. We unfortunately can't embed a 2d hyperbolic space on a computer screen.by noosphr
- 1D languages encode these relations grammatically. There is no reason why a 2D language couldn't also be grammatical. Sure it is harder to write a 2D parser perhaps, but people have still played with the idea a little bit. There is just no huge economic incentive to do so other than simple aesthetics.
- I maintain some FPGA code in VHDL and also some C code for microcontroller. One thing I appreciate immensely about VHDL is how strict it is. You have no option but to think carefully about modularity and heirarchy. By comparison C is very free and simply offers the opportunity to make your own constraints.
Notably the mental model of the hardware is different for each case. Other species of languages like Lisps and Golang and SIMD fascinate me because computer hardware fascinates me.
I like the toy 2D textual experiment the author has given us, and I agree with you it would not scale. Since the author calls their toy 'goofy' they probably agree. But I would contest (edit: your point that we are not stuck in our ways.) We are by and large seriously stuck in our ways. Even if a perfect visual/spatial programming language dropped into our laps today, I posit it would take over 50 years to meaningfully supplant C et al..
by hermitShell - A certain subset of programmers apparently just really, really hate this whole messy concept of "thinking about things".
Text works and is hard because it's a projection of a mental representation. The whole reason we can work with N-dimensional structures in text is because the dimensionality lives in the programmer's head. There isn't really any other way to represent say a >3 dimensional array other than laboriously flattening it into text and expecting the next guy to rotate the hypercube in his mind. That's neither a good nor bad thing, it's purely a fact of our 3+1 dimensional universe.
A shocking number of problems can be best represented in higher dimensions and there's simply no way to encode that information losslessly. Being simple 3D creatures (I'd argue 2D in fact) the only way to do that is by projecting it down into a lower-dimensional space.
by vitally3643