Beautiful code: typography and visual programming - Peter Hilton

The way we visually present code today would do little to surprise the first owner of the 1955 IBM typewriter that introduced the Courier typeface. Since then, we’ve gained little more than bigger monitors, syntax colouring and better monospace typefaces. Meanwhile, layout and typography, already centuries old during the desktop publishing revolution thirty years ago, are the basis for how we read all kinds of text that aren’t code.
The goal of this talk is to reconsider what code looks like, and why programmers’ tools seem stuck in the 1970s. This talk first explores how layout and typography can make code beautiful, and then considers the disruptive potential of visual programming. The most important impact of both trends turns out to be code readability. After all, as Knuth pointed out, ‘Programs are meant to be read by humans, and only incidentally for computers to execute.’

NDC Conferences

[modgeosys]

I spend a lot of my time using FME by Safe Software as a kind of visual domain-specific programming language. It's actually a very productive professional tool for its domain, which is data and application integration, especially when there's a geographic or other spatial element. I still use git for version control, but per my recommendation (and agreement with many other FME users) years ago, Safe created a diff and merge tool that works with the visual workflows.

[berkano_plays]

27:44 "Set your font to proportional, to troll your colleagues". Trolls himself :D
I don't know, but that totally breaks the reading cadence for me... And the code tends to clump into blobs. Fails the "squint test" right from the start...

[GelidGanef]

I only wish this guy had put out some kind of plug-in that actually enacted a few of these innovations, so people could get it under their fingertips to see how it feels.

[jjurksztowicz]

Agree in principle, but haven't seen anything like this implemented in a way that wouldn't lock me into some awful editor. Text editors are easy to find, and there are plenty of high quality ones available for free. I don't know of a single typographic layout program that is both available and pleasant to use.

I tend to think that something like a doxygen tool that sits over your code will have to bridge the gap until we can get our shit together as a community and create open source tools that can do this and programmers will _want_ to use.

[felixkohlgruber]

There's a lot of people working on interesting projects and discussing innovative ideas.

[NBGTFO]

There are much more pressing issues to worry about than this.