Daily Thought - 2024-09-17
Hey, I'm Hanno! These are my daily thoughts on Crosscut, the programming language I'm creating. If you have any questions, comments, or feedback, please get in touch!
This thought was published before Crosscut was called Crosscut! If it refers to "Caterpillar", that is the old name, just so you know.
I believe that languages should provide infrastructure to render data types as more than just text. But I don't think it's enough to just build vectors into the language and hardcode how to render them into the tooling. This might work for vectors, but the concept is applicable to so much more. It needs to be extensible by the developer.
Understanding a geometric algorithm using vectors, is going to require a much different graphical representation than understanding a sorting algorithm. And maybe a much different representation than a different geometric algorithm also using vectors. I think trying to solve that at the language level would be of limited benefit.
I believe the visualizations need to be defined at the library level. The language just needs to provide common infrastructure that libraries can build on, and that the tooling can understand, without having to know the specifics of the library.
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