Comment by conartist6

3 hours ago

What I wonder is: why has nobody noticed that code editors lack a concept of 0?

When you're writing code, you can express any concept except that of an unfilled hole. We've rearranged every part of the coding process in a twisted-up way, all for the lack of a way to express lack.

If you want to be more clear about what I mean, look to tools which can express holes like https://scratch.mit.edu and https://hazel.org. They give the feeling of letting things snap together like lego bricks. Indeed, lego bricks themselves function because of the negative space (the holes) in them!

This could be interesting but too vague for me to understand what you mean. Could it be explained more clearly, or link some blog entry?

  • Yeah, I will. I'm being a bit coy because I already have a very specific solution in mind which would be a lot like Scratch, but unifying those ideas with syntax. It should be fully ready to share quite soon.

Like Madlibs?

  • Ugh I got rate limited so I had to make a new acct just to post this reply:

    Sure! Like mad libs if you couldn't be sure if _____ was a missing part or the text what was meant to be there. In a mad lib it's obvious, but with code it may be less obvious. You certainly can't just use _ with code. Even the nil code point is allowed in some programming languages' source code (e.g. rust).