Programmers: I Have A Challenge For You

[Chris Hibner]

Originally Posted by gvarndell

For the record, this didn't start out as a Labview discussion and I didn't lead it here -- nor did I want to.
There was first a claim that iconic programming was replacing text based programming.
I claimed that, on the contrary, text based programming is the foundation upon which iconic programming is built.
Icons (nodes if you prefer) graphically represent machine code.
AFAIK, other than compiling and/or assembling text files, we have no spiffier way of producing the machine code.

I never said text based languages would disappear. I said that they would fall away from being the norm, just like assembly isn't the norm today. When I started working in the embedded controls area, everything was done in assembly. Right after I started the company decided to do the first product done in C. You wouldn't believe how many, "oh, that'll never work" statements were going around the office.

Text to graphical coding is no different than the last evolution from assembly to C. Just like many graphical "languages" start out by auto-coding C, most C compilers start out by "auto-coding" the C to assembly. That doesn't mean that C isn't a higher level language than assembly, nor does it mean everyone has to know assembly to use C. Assembly is just the relic and the automation handles the details.

There also isn't necessarily a chicken-and-egg scenario. The original C compiler was most likely written in assembly or another high level language (like, say, FORTRAN). Current C compilers are written using the previous C compiler. In other words, you may need a different language to write the initial compiler, but as soon as you write that first compiler, you may be able to do away with it from that point on.

With all of that being said, text based programming is currently more efficient for coding than graphical languages in certain areas (as I said in the original post). For that reason, I don't see text based programming dying any time soon. What I do see is it will become less and less prevalent and it will only be used when there isn't a much better choice (much like when people use assembly today).