What the rain knows

Representing programs as text strings makes programming harder then it has to be. The source text of a program is far removed from its behavior. Bridging this conceptual gulf is what makes programming so inhumanly difficult – we are not compilers. Subtext is a new medium in which the representation of a program is the same thing as its execution. Like a spreadsheet, a program is visible and alive, constantly executing even as it is edited.

That’s a quote from the abstract to Jonathan Edwards’ 2005 paper Subtext: Uncovering the Simplicity of Programming (PDF). There are links to more recent papers and videos on the Subtext site, subtextual.org. As of a few minutes ago, I’m subscribed to Edwards’ blog at alarmingdevelopment.org. Edwards is a Research Fellow at MIT with the Software Design Group at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.

I’d read mentions of Subtext on a couple of other blogs recently, but it was My Mind is Blown that got me to watch part of a screencast showing off one of the killer features of the newest version of Subtext, schematic tables.