MacWorld part 2

[James Richards]

There is a very real sense in which words can be viewed as icons, but 
complex icons which have certain possibilities of interrelationship 
built into them.  This is probably hard to simulate in iconic 
programming

Regards

James

On 14 Jan, 2005, 2005 18:07:59 -0800, Richard Gaskin wrote:

> Before writing SuperCard, Bill Appleton wrote CourseBuilder, an
> award-winning iconic programming system for courseware that was
> eventually used for a wide range of things, even games.  When I
> interviewed him for a computer journal the month SuperCard was released
> I asked him about CourseBuilder, and about iconic programming in
> general.  His take was pretty much what you wrote:  It sounds great on
> paper and even demoes well for simple things, but the moment you move
> into anything complex you're stuck looking at a spider web of boxes and
> lines, the clarity such a design provided initially is long gone, and
> you still don't have complex behaviors.
>
> Part of Appleton's motivation for creating SuperCard was his feeling
> that textual programming, such as scripting, offered much greater
> expressiveness.
>
> Seems us scripters don't have it so bad after all. :)
>
> --
>   Richard Gaskin
>   Fourth World Media Corporation