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My approach is to start out with a 2D programming environment and once that becomes a general programming environment, to scale that up to 3D and explore how to map 2D to 3D. So first map 1D concepts to 2D and then move on.

As a 2D representation, I've been using flow based programming (FBP)[1] and it's incarnation in Node-RED[2]. The trick here is to understand how to use FBP to create more generalistic programs, i.e., to prove it's Turing Complete.

I think it would be a mistake to just start out with a 2D approach without also taking all the learnings we have made in 1D, i.e. TDD, OOP, KISS, DRY, Functional, Message Passing, Processes etc, and porting those to a 2D representation.

[1]: https://jpaulm.github.io/fbp/

[2]: https://nodered.org/

by ivanjermakov6 hours ago|

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I think humans are pretty good at thinking/operating in a 3D space. It's just that digital interface and programming tooling is not there. Obviously because usually there is no direct translation from domain model to physical 3D shapes. But it can well for those that translate: 3D modelling, spatial reasoning, motion tracking, mechanics, etc.

by xpct6 hours ago|

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I imagine this varies by person, but thinking about a source file is already reminiscent of 2D space navigation, where the X axis is typically gated by conditions. In a similar vein, when I think about functions from different source files, I do hold some type of "depth", or "stacked panels" in my brain.

I think this is because I reason about programs being in some state ~= being positioned at a certain function with some context I carry around. I'm sure it's not the only way to think about it, but it's a reasonable abstraction over what computers do. It's how we oriented our debuggers and early IDEs on as well, and carried this over to modern tools.

Definitely something I'll be thinking about during the next few days.

by ivanjermakov5 hours ago|

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For real! Good contenders for 3 dimensions: individual expressions, call stack, time.