Presented by:

The Absraction Obstruction, or Is The Beginning The End or Can We Get To The Destination If We Haven't even arrived at the Start Yet?

I can't code. I've tried for years to do it, but text based languages drive me up the wall, and then I discovered Snap.

Visual Languages blew my mind and I dove as deep as I could... but for someone that can't really code... trying to dive deeper into the workings of the programming language got me into the same problem. Text or Visual, there are assumptions that can't be questioned, even though they really should be.

Is Abstraction the answer or is it actually the problem causing people to not actually dig into some of the major problems plaguing computational research.

I love Snap, but I don't actually want to use Snap beyond Tool Maintenance. It's the concept called Tooling Up, or using the tools you have, to build the tools you need in order to build the tools you want and then reaching that point and starting again.

Coding is often called the Foundation of knowledge in Computer Science/Information Technology/Any and Every Field Here but the catch is, very simply, how many people who aren't paid to worry about the foundation of a buiulding, actually pay ANY attention to the foundation of ANY building. At All?

What do I want then. Honestly, that's my problem. I don't know, but in the attempt to read dozens of textbooks in the subject in order to drill down to what I want, they all abstract away things that shouldn't be abstracted in the assumption that you know it, that you heard it somewhere, but it's abstraction all the way down.

I tried the Dev Mode for Snap once, but aside from being Windows3.1 dialogue boxes with Javascript code, there wasn't anytrhing useful unless you can read abstracted foundational jargon.

I can't.

I can't code.

Text Languages are not designed well, and they all assume they are and that they do it better than the other text languages. Abstraction. Obfuscation. "You already know thing, if you don't you're in trouble"

I want Snap to build my programmng language, and then I can use that, and what i want is, to be honest, Visual Assembly. Which I'm sure many people will look at and come up with many convincing reasons as to why that's a bad idea, convincing reasons, sure, but good reasons? Nope. Abstracted to the point of Opacity. Recursion of Recursion of Recursion of Knowledge until someone somewhere knows how to fix it, but you don't know who they are or if they're still contactable.

How do you read a map if the sector of the map is another map with a different legend? Then you finally find that legend and key, only realise each sector of that map also uses a different ruleset to generate the map and a different logic for that map.

Duration:
5 min
Room:
Plenary
Conference:
Snap!Con 2022
Type:
Lightning Talk