{"id":294,"date":"2009-04-15T09:54:52","date_gmt":"2009-04-15T14:54:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/15\/beyond-two-page-programs\/"},"modified":"2009-04-15T09:54:54","modified_gmt":"2009-04-15T14:54:54","slug":"beyond-two-page-programs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/15\/beyond-two-page-programs\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond Two Page Programs"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>And one of the things that is disturbingly true about most novices on computers is that<strong> about 2 pages of program is the maximum they can handle<\/strong>.  They like to spread it out, <strong>use their visual field as an extension of their short term memory<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&#8211;Alan Kay From <a href=\"http:\/\/www.archive.org\/search.php?query=doing%20with%20images%20makes%20symbols\"><cite>Doing With Images Makes Symbols<\/cite><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A few thoughts on this phenomenon.<\/p>\n<p>A denser, more concise, less &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/daringfireball.net\/2005\/09\/englishlikeness_monster\">English like<\/a>&#8221; programming language would counter-intuitivly be <em>easier<\/em> for novices to use, if it let them keep their project below the 2-page limit.<\/p>\n<p>Does this limit increase with <a href=\"http:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2008\/04\/25\/larger-displays-are-better-more-displays-are-better\/\">more and bigger displays<\/a>?<\/p>\n<p>Do <a href=\"http:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/18\/touching-the-information\/\">graphical programming language<\/a> change anything? It seems like they might &#8220;scale&#8221; better on a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nas.nasa.gov\/Groups\/VisTech\/hyperwall\/\">very large display<\/a>. But in my (albeit limited) experience they are much less compact then textual source code. And it&#8217;s not clear to me they support abstraction as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>And one of the things that is disturbingly true about most novices on computers is that about 2 pages of program is the maximum they can handle. They like to spread it out, use their visual field as an extension of their short term memory &#8211;Alan Kay From Doing With Images Makes Symbols A few [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,12,4,24],"tags":[333,385,345,334,384],"class_list":["post-294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accessibility","category-design","category-programming","category-quotes","tag-alan-kay","tag-cognition","tag-displays","tag-doing-with-images-makes-symbols","tag-memory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}