New Requests for Startups
> What comes after programming languages?<p>I've been working on this for several years, though a startup seems the wrong vehicle for it. I think the description in the RFS is misguided:<p><i>"We’re interested in helping developers create better software, faster. This includes new ways to write, understand, and collaborate on code, and the next generation of tools and infrastructure for delivering software continuously and reliably."</i><p>There's a blind spot in prose like this that gets repeated all over the place in our community: it emphasizes writing over reading. I think we have to start with reading. My hypothesis is that we need to reform the representation of programs to address this use case: I download the sources for a tool I use, wanting to make a tweak. How can I orient myself and make a quick change in just one afternoon? This is hard today; it can take weeks or months to figure out the global organization of a codebase.<p>You can't "deliver software continuously and reliably" until you rethink its underpinnings. Before the delivery problem there's a <i>literacy</i> problem: we programmers prefer to write our own, or to wrap abstraction layers over the code of others, rather than first understanding what has come before.<p>More on my approach: <a href="http://akkartik.name/about" rel="nofollow">http://akkartik.name/about</a>