language parallax

Not long ago my friend John — who works in the defense industry — and I were talking about programming tools and technologies. As usual, I got to talking about my research interests and we got to talking about referential integrity and different “views” of programs and systems. This led John to bring up Visio, and I was happy he did. There’s an obvious example of a system that hurts for lack of “symbolic integration”.

I think this is where JetBrains was going in describing a molecule language in a post about knowledge representation. After talking about how the deep referential integrity that I think is implied by “symbolic integration” could be applied to visual systems, John said that he thought that Telelogic was a good example of a company in this space. (Where have I seen them before? Possibly on machine room diagrams from the old Excite days? That would make sense..)

At any rate, it will be interesting to see how these technologies evolve w.r.t. visual programming environments. I’ve never been one for UML — probably because there didn’t exist the right kind of “symbolic integration” between the UML descriptions and the actual implementation. One conceptual hurdle that language-oriented programming will have in affecting the development of these visual systems is simply the word “language”, which will have to mean something much more metaphorical than what it means when we talk about text-based languages. Nevertheless, I think it’s a good metaphor.