ITT: silly ideas we have

Yet UML specifications are not chunks of text, nor are the sketches you draw on your notebook. This goes to prove that your brain does in fact not think in terms of text natively.
Maybe visual programming just needs more research.

Plain text is the lowest common denominator. You'll get something that works with existing text editors and existing version control.
Good editors and IDEs let you operate on the program at a higher level. They complete identifiers for you, track them across the file, insert scaffolding for control structures, and so on. Most syntax errors are avoided, and you're immediately told about the ones you do make.
They can do that because programming languages are designed to be converted to an abstract representation that can be reasoned about.

i was thinking about a web browser that can only deal with HTML CSS and PHP how retarded is this?

HTML+CSS is how pre-1995 web browsers ran, so it's a good thing.
PHP is supposed to be used as a server-side language, so it doesn't make sense to include it in a browser.

You can do this with any browser today. All you have to do is disable Javascript.

(version seml-1)(document :title "My Awesome Websight" :lang en :style "/static/style.ss" :script "/static/script.cl")(header (image "/static/banner.png" :float left) (unordered-list :float right :horizontal :style none (link "/about.seml" About me) (link "/cgi-bin/contact.cl" Contact me)))(section About this site (p This site is a collection of my ebin warez.) (ordered-list (link "/nd.seml" Nigger detector) (link "/tads.seml" Terry A. Davis Simulator)))(footer (p (sym copy) (date Y) Faglord.))
r8

Visual programming research is a waste of resources and any publicly-funded project on such should be defunded

My stupid idea is standardisation of PC-setup tiers for gaming. Nothing to do with manufacturing the computers themselves but just a checklist of minimum hardware capabilities a computer must have to qualify as "tier X"

Doom: PC requirements: tier 4

If it wasn't a retarded idea, it would provide guidelines for game developers in the same way console specs do.

If you disable JS most sites nowdays break

Good that you created this thread, OP, I have been ruminating this stupid idea for a software for some time
Why do we use shitty Adobe's® PDF when SHTML exist outside of the binary/printing uses
What I would like to see is a 90's website-builder-like program for creating documents and static websites, as they are documents in the end
I was thinking about the following benefits:
We do everything on mobile today, and to open a PDF on it is a pain. Nobody prints documents anymore and even if they do SHTML does the job
The web ecosystem is huge and mature, we would have all kind of document builders of every use-case and platform, even webapps Normies loves webapps
Also, anyone would be able to jump from the WYSIWYG to the markup code without having to learn the shady PostScript
Everybody has a browser installed and HTML can be opened even from the terminal. The only problem is that Chromium and Firefox does not support SHTML, but that can be easily fixed
Its more secure for obvious reasons

I know its a shit idea, otherwise this would already exist

yeah, all the bad ones

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We should put more resources into building lisp machines, and OS's rather than continuing to build on the clusterfuck that is linux

Can I create a SHTML document and know that it'll look exactly the same on the recipient's screen?

No, but that's my point
If you need a binary document stick with PDF/DjaVu

And removing javascript functionality from your browser entirely won't?

It does work. Just install uMatrix and disable JS for all sites. DONE. But as other user said it will break most sites because they load content dynamically or use onclick events instead of links and CSS.

He means that bloatfox uses JS for some of its functionality. UI elements, IIRC.

When you disable Javascript, it stops the Javascript from executing on any webpage. Disabling Javascript in Firefox isn't going to break the Firefox UI because Javascript will continue to operate on the UI.

I know what you meant. He doesn't, or perhaps chose to interpret what you said like that on purpose. Possibly for comedic effect or somesuch.

That's called visual programming and the only place it ever got traction was in teaching elementary school kids the basics of algorhythms.

The biggest problem with visual programming languages like LabVIEW is that they don't scale very well. They're harder to maintain because you have to consider more spatial factors than you do with text - things like how far apart stuff is spaced, how wide/tall they are, how they should be visually organized, etc. And what happens if you need to rewrite a chunk of a big program? You'll have to do a ton of rewiring and reorganizing elements. Also, VPLs are spatially HUGE; you have to scroll up, down, and even left and right to see everything in a big enough program.

Text is far more efficient and maintainable.

Microsoft has tried this at times in the past:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_PC
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_System_Design_Guide
Honestly, I thought Valve would implement some sort of automatic system requirement filtering as part of their Steam Machine initiative, but of course they fumbled that completely.

How about something that actually respects the "separation of content and presentation" intended with SGML-knockoffs like HTML/CSS, and had a complete GUI designed in such a way that NOBODY would ever have to actually look at the raw markup? It's called FrameMaker. Incidentally, remember that the web itself was never intended for anyone to write HTML by hand, as all of CERN/W3C's model web clients weren't just "browsers", but also had WYSIWYG editing as a core function.

Reading about FrameMaker shows that they moved from SGML to XML. Also, without CSS3 it wouldn't have one of the main features of my idea, the responsiveness to different screen sizes.

True, murkup is readable that I forget about it. But it still useful that you can check the source code yourself and understand it.

PDF has supported features such as reflow ever since the introduction of "structured" PDF in Acrobat 3, when exported correctly. And SGML/XML/HTML/CSS(Yes, FrameMaker can be used for CSS) are merely export formats for FrameMaker's native internal markup format, whose features are a superset of all of them.

My point is that the urge to edit raw document code is itself indicative of brain damage from software using the wrong paradigm for markup. What's needed is strict separation of content from presentation, from the final document, clear back to the initial authoring tools.

Why would I "need a binary document"?
I just need my shit to look the same wherever I view it. I don't care whether it's binary or valid UTF-8, I care that it looks the same. Replacing PDF by something that doesn't look the same everywhere is pointless.

because plain ASCII is what's on the keyboard
Because emacs is a programmable editor which is extended using the programmable programming language of elisp. While the roots of the editor are old, GNU emacs is still being developed along with packages for it to this day.

...

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Here is my silly idea.
Why don't we have automatic formal prover (something like Coq) that has logic gates as axioms and use it to create formal proofs of correctness for hardware. Then exposes those hardware proofs to OS devs who use them as base for proving correctness for OS. Then drivers devs get proofs from OS and hardware and use them to prove correctness of drivers. Application devs get hardware, OS and drivers proofs and use them to prove correctness of their apps.

Part one of my response is that it's insanely hard and part two of my response is that they're already doing that

It's been done in the 80's, but it's only useful for simple applications. Example (13:10): youtube.com/watch?v=rssl5hbJI_0

I was unaware of this PDF reflow feature, but I wander how easy to do and accessible it is, as I have never seen an responsive PDF

What you described is called a "binary document", it has nothing to do with encoding
The point is not the replace PDF, as I said in the very first post

What's your criteria on that? Nuclear fusion has so far yielded no energy-positive results for the last 50 years, but it's certainly something I want to keep being funded.

How will I wear clever clothes then, user?

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Fairly good, but needs some tweaking.

>Right now you are coupling document structure with document contents. While this simplifies things for quick and dirty development, you may want to decouple or allow to decouple actual contents (text, links, etc) from layout to allow easy i18n and to let backend devs and frontend devs to work independently a lot of frontend devs complain about backend devs modifying the HTML structure the program generates, which breaks their CSS because CSS is incredibly fragile. You can achieve this by letting SEML structures reference contents of other parts of the structure or other structures.

Otherwise bretty gud, even if I fucking despise float layouting.

I've had this idea too. Mainly while writing Arduino stuff because people said "you can already do that" but those don't look like what I had imagined.
Blockly and Scratch look too crude, they don't have anything to help with truly large programs.

I'm not sure that the flowchart-style would always work however.
And some of the LabVIEW screenshots I looked at, look just as confusing as thousands of lines of code. I don't think the electronic-schematic style works well either.
Whatever overall diagram method is used, the logic of the area in view should be reasonably easy to understand.

Almost everything should be manipulated with the mouse. The only time that you should NEED to type anything is when you are naming something, or commenting.

Idea: Come up with new actually good standards for operating systems and shill them to developers like we're massive turbokike CIAniggers. If enough standards catch on, maybe then it would be easier to mix and match the parts of operating systems without having to learn to install Gentoo. The day when you can roll your own operating system without being an autist, and still have your freedom or have everything just work or anything in between, and not have to still compile everything yourself unless you want to or are principled and smart enough to do so, is the day of GNU/Linux/BSD/whateverthefuckelse desktop.

Look at Asciidoc. Might be useful for someone here.
Asciidoc is a simple normie readable plain-text markup format similar to Markdown but much more powerful.
asciidoc.org
Alternative documentation and converter: asciidoctor.org

Dumb idea: Why not replace PDFs with EPUB, MOBI and DJVU?

Another dumb idea: Why not establish Python3 as a must-learn language in education?

Never used MOBI nor DJVU, but EPUB isn't meant to maintain aspect across platforms, which is the whole point of PDF.

Also I agree about Python3.

Does Python have an ISO standard like C? If not, then now you know the reason. Languages like C are industry standard simply because they are recognized by international standard bodies like ISO. Its the job of the Python developers to lobby ISO to draft a standardized version of Python before educational institutions can take it seriously.

The BASIC Programming Language for example is under ISO/IEC 10279:1991

Looking at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_International_Organization_for_Standardization_standards

And ctrl+F for "Python" yields 0 results. But seraching "Programming Language" brings up 69 results. Everything from C to BASIC to the Windows API to ECMAScript. But not Python

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So we need an ISO standard for Python and Haskell (like how JS works)?
Why did they NOT do that, considering it would be beneficial to everyone?

...

But that's not the reason at all. Plenty of universities teach Python as an introduction to programming. And Python is used an awful lot in the industry. Now stop LARPing.

Read carefully
Not just college but have the whole department of education (of any country) to give a thumbs up for k-12.

Nigger I'm not pretending like I'm the authority on teaching Python in schools. Never did I once say Python is never taught anywhere. I was addressing why it seems like Python isn't fully established in any standard programming language curriculum. and that's probably why

White men don't care if it's text only.

Correct me if I'm wrong (and I might), but
1) Universities, even public one, are largely independent from the ministry of education of a particular country (or at least in our Western liberal democracies)
2) programming is seldom taught elsewhere than at a university
So the particular national authorities in charge of education shouldn't really have much to say in which languages are taught, and AFAIK they don't.

Nah, languages are taught according to what the job market demands, which is why a shitton of universities (including mine) teach programming with Java, even though it's a horrible language for that purpose.

t. absolute retard with no real world experience
>>>Zig Forums

You mean one of these? We have them and they present little merit. If your programming skill is absolute nil, they allow you to craft something trivial. That's where their usefulness ends, as any non-trivial algorithm grows absurdly unweildy very quickly, not to mention it takes 10 times as long to implement using GUI as it is to write it down.

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More or less like this, yes, but as you've pointed out,
1) more manageable
2) quicker to create
3) with more visualization aiding (data paths and stuff)

It already has the best manageability for a visual editor, it's the quickest to use for a visual editor, and it visualizes data flow the best for a visual editor. UE's blueprint editor is a paragon of visual editors, we've come very long way to get there. It's GUI nature is its inherent advantage and limitation. Just like GUI makes it easier to use a program if your skill is right about zero, a text interface is immensely more convenient and quick to operate.

To give you a physical object analogy that's easy to grasp. Imagine a very complex machine with fuckload of knobs and switches. You turn the knobs and switches to operate it. That's GUI. Now imagine you just tell a technican to do some shit and he goes and does it for you, except when you ask him nonsense and he does nothing. That's CLI.

Nuclear fusion produced the biggest explosion this planet have seen since Cambrian. Fusion for electricity sounds pretty retarded, due to absurd running costs of the fusion facility, a lot of which is the cost of the fusion fuel.

This is how you tell apart real languages from meme languages.

You seem to not understand fusion at all, at least watch a youtube video or two or something.

Fusion energy is the holy grail of energy production right now, and the moment someone finds the way: it will be implemented on a global scale in the blink of an eye.

You seem to EXTREMELY confused. The fuel(deuterium, which is relatively plentiful, and tritium, which can be generated in the reactor itself) is absurdly cheap compared to basically everything else involved in making and maintaining a fusion reactor.

Because you're retarded. There are billions and billions of dollars, euros, pounds, renmibi and whatnot being invested in research on nuclear fusion in this very moment.

I refuse to believe this is the best that can ever be done and that we will never improve upon that.

Yea but no.
An on-screen container (such as a visual frame) is a better way of grouping related information than just 1 big list of scrolling list of lines of text; even distros that claim to use only a CLI try to imitate information grouping on-screen.

And if each separate frame can scroll around on its own list of information, then that makes them even more useful.
And now you have a GUI.

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Worshipping at the altar of the CLI is like looking into an empty room.
Linux has only succeeded in gaining more users by copying the GUI features that Windows and Mac already offered.
Once upon a time, *none* of the popular (at the time) Linux distros came with any GUI included.
Now they all do.
Why is that?

*Fission made the largest explosions

I'm sympathetic to what OP is saying. There are inherent limitations to plain, textual representation of code, namely that you scroll through it linearly (when not jumping due to a search). So it seems like there should be a better way to represent hierarchical designs. I don't think whatever "that" is, though, necessarily looks like this. >>90005

This has a similar problem to logic circuit diagrams, where once you do things more than a little complex, it becomes a maze of wires. Of course, you can represent a bundle of gates as "high-level box 1", but you have to do that an annoying large amount of times to keep things readable.

Perhaps Terry was onto something with his ability to stick 3D models right into the middle of a text file.

Tsar Bomba was a fusion weapon.

Not in Hong Kong they don't (even though the standard is archaic with BASIC), neither is Japan.
japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/02/15/national/japan-introduce-new-high-school-compulsory-subjects/

I'm gonnna use this thread for a brainlet question I have and which I cannot find a solution for on search engines.

Disclaimer: I know how logic gates work as a component and what to do with them.
I do not understand one thing, though.

How in the everloving fuck is it possible to feedback loop a logic gate.
Like a latch, for example.

How is it timed?
Shouldn't the circuit become unstable and break?
If the output feeds into itself while at the same time relying on the input, then how the hell does it work itself out?

The crux of this for my brain is the, for the lack of words, simultaneous state, or something.
I don't see how it's ordered, even if the gate itself introduces some sort of short delay where it "calculates" things.

This is too much for my brainlet head.
Please explain how this works.

Why isn't there a race condition or something?
Fuck.

I can build a fucking adder and computer myself, but I have to just accept the "nature" of the gates as if they are magic that simply has to be arranged in a certain way.

You don't even have to help me directly, you can link me to a video or something as long as it explains why the things don't trip over their own legs in a not completely rocket surgeon manner.

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Incorrect perspective.
Javascript broke most of the web.
You are just now coming to terms with this reality.

This is way too complex by the way, I have troubles with the extreme fundamentals like this one here.

How does it go back into itself while also being able to change the output?
If the output is acts as an input which can change the output, then how does the universe decide adhfsaljfsldf.
How can the output be the input if the output depends on the input that can possibly change the output which would then change the input which would change the output.

Fuck, man.

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maybe something like befunge but with popup color boxes and shit.

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Because the change isn't INSTANT, merely very, very fast.

PDF is used for ebooks where EPUB and others are more suitable.
PDFs should be reserved for forms and documents, not educational materials.

Yeah. And with Vim-tier keyboard manipulation so that you don't need your mouse to edit stuff.

Nah, fusion is WAY more powerful than fission, simply because the mass/energy difference between deuterium/tritium and helium-4 is the highest possible.

You're thinking too high level here. Think at an electrical level.
Here, each of the components (which can be relays, transistors, vacuum tubes, it doesn't matter) will only let current (actually, electric potential) flow through them if their input potential is above a certain level (which we call 1).

Here is how it looks when we activate the input A. Red = parts of the circuits that have a potential of 5V, black = parts of the circuit that have a potential of 0V (or GND).

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Because the change doesn't work on the current input cycle. It changes part of the input state for the *next* input cycle.

The logic gate symbol is an over-simplification. A real flip-flop circuit has more parts than that:
talkingelectronics.com/projects/5-Projects/Projects16.html

Note that (in reality) many complex logical flip-flop circuits (the ones used in real microprocessors) also depend on a clock signal to propagate state changes correctly. They don't really work as stand-alone circuits with just 1 button to change them.

Also We Note: a flip-flop circuit can be built that will store a bit value on 1 clock cycle, but that takes more than 1 clock cycle to reset. This is the basic building block of microchips. It is how serial data is changed to parallel and parallel to serial, and it is how bits are stored and then retrieved for later use in digital memory.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip-flop_(electronics)

Its far more effective to just have a diagram in a comment block or as an image in the same directory as the source file with a 'diagram xyz.jpg explains what this code is doing' comment. What IDEs and such need to incorporate is the ability to show an image inline with the code if the filename is in a comment, so all I have to put is a /* diagram_xyz.jpg */ and it automatically displays it inline provided the image is in the same directory.

Updating comments and code in parallel is a dangerous practice, as code tends to be updated whereas comments do not, leading to confusing codebases and its inevitable rotting.

This is why you should avoid comments as possible and favour instead clear naming.

Well not.... so much.
I think that once you create a name for a thing (variable/function/class/property/method) then you should never need to re-type it. You should just be able to drag it from a pertinent list.

The same goes for any regular statement. Things like if() statements, if()-if else() statements, for loops, while loops, do-while loops, never change. Only the variables and numbers change. So why should you have to type the whole statement? It just wastes your time and doesn't help anything.
,,,
And the IDE shouldn't SHOW you that automatically-generated code, so you can't accidentally mess it up.

What about auto-completion? Typing is very often much faster than dragging stuff with your mouse? Of course, mouse should be available because limiting ourselves to one thing is stupid.

SeL4 already does this, no?

How about 3D VR visual programming? Kinect programming?

Yea but then you need to be able to remember all the variables and classes that are within scope.
And if the IDE provides a list of all the variables and classes within scope, then it would be faster to just drag one off that list, than it would be to type the name.

Also when I start planning how to write anything that is complicated, I begin by drawing boxes for the classes (in a column on the left of the drawing) and then draw rightward arrows that show what other classes each of these classes must be able to make calls into. Since you must avoid making circular references or method calls, that is easier to see on a visual presentation than it is in text.

It's been some time, but I'd like to thank you all for your answers.

Makes sense and I have made a lot of progress since.

I read your answers back then but didn't want to reply just then until I understood things well enough.

constructing an emoji standard.

Underrated post. Very nice user.

We literally already have that. And there's a reason why we don't use it.

hooktube.com/watch?v=ZON5UuibJXI

Languages get standardized because they are industry standard (not the other way round) and there are competing implementations. C, BASIC, and LISP have standards because everybody had their own compiler that had different, mutually incompatible features. Java and Python have never been standardized because there is only one vendor peddling each of these, and Java is undeniably industry standard.

we should build programs on top of HTML files!

Why not MSWord documents?

i like the trolling potential of this idea

So you favor Java for programming?

That too! And PDF!

Are you trying to tell me that a language with millions of pajeet programmers and universities dedicated to spewing out more isn't industry standard? This has nothing to do with my feelings on the language, and everything to do with observable facts.
As for my feelings, I think Java gets a bad rap. Mainly because few of those Java programmers transition into C/C++ well: most of them will leak memory like a sieve and bog down their projects with their inability to manage memory. The language itself isn't all bad, but most of its programmers are crap.

I think Simulink does visual programming well. The domain is accustomed to the complex diagrams that it creates, and it allows for turning groups of operations into boxed components, mitigating the complexity issue.

The other reason is that it was utter crap 20 years ago. The language went a long way since then, but a lot of people learned it back then and vowed to never touch it again without a hazmat suit. That's where a lot of bad opinions about Java come from.
Kind of like a lot of C++ haters had learned it in early nineties, well before the standard library even got standardised.