Towards Less-Linguistic Programming

Alternative: Picture-Based Programming

Linguistic frontend to abstract or simplify programmatic operations using some high or low-level programming language as a linguistic backend.

• Images or pictures (hieroglyphics or cuneiform) can be run through a ML library (via subscription services) to execute functions locally or externally.
• These can be color-coded (color-based programming) and need not be graphs (connected diagrams).

Such images or pictures would be analogous to punch-cards used in older vacuum-base machines.

The images could correspond to a model type (see LOG).

I don't think this would displace programmers and would be job creating:

1. Creates a category of (and requires) new standards and conventions for an as-yet non-existant web application layer.
2. Syntax or technique-specific best practices and conventions can be built into the backend.
3. Broadens the user base for languages - assists with teaching and on-boarding.
4. Also, potentially creates another (new) web application layer between linguistic frontends and linguistic backends that can process images, pictures, colors, sounds, whatever, etc.

The closest I've seen to this idea is Piet programming.

Services that provide diagrammatic work-flows are not quite what I had in mind but come close to the idea here. These services largely abstract integrating two services together (which is valuable and powerful by itself). However, they do not provide robust flexibility independently of the cloud UI's in which they are written. If these were removed of their cloud UI context and tethered solely to raw programming functionality we'd arrive at the idea above.