What is Text-Orientation?
One becomes text-aware when one realizes that everything one does with a computer is manipulating text. For example in software development. In a relational database system you create a table, you insert some records, you perform a query. But what are you then really doing? You are writing SQL statements and letting the computer run them. You write some scripts, too, and you write some sentences in programming languages called source code. Working does not dirty your hands and your muscles do not get tired from it. Why? Because you are writing.
The current technologies hide this fact by offering for each task a completely different tool. The operating system's shell is one thing, then you have a separate surface to manage the relational database, and you have also a stand-alone program that is not very compatible with them and is paradoxically called integrated development environment. The look and feel of each of those is completely different, they are not tied together, and therefore you experience each action and think of it as if it were a completely different thing.
One adopts a text-oriented attitude when one arrives to this decision: it is text, let us handle it as text, too! What is programming? Programming is saying things. You say ”do this,“ ”show me that,“ ”modify it this way,“ that's all. When you speak you don't repeat long sentences again and again, you just say ”as I already said.“ You introduce once a name for a complex state of facts, and then just repeatedly point to it by name. Programming can also be so easy and it must be. It is unnecessary complication, to coerce you to say some kind of things in a particular window with particular keyboard shortcuts while some other kind of things must be entered by clicking on a tree view with the mouse or typing a sentence with a particular syntax. It should be possible to say the same things by different means, it should be possible for the user to pick up the form of expression as she or he sees fit each time. It is unnecessary complication, to have to say the same sentences again and again, instead of using a pronoun and saying just ”now that again.“ It is unnecessary complication to have to code the same algorithm over and over, just because you happen to have written it in a particular language and you need it now in another one or because this time there is a slight variation in it. It should be possible to say just ”same but instead of this that.“ Programming is speaking to the computer. It can be so easy as speaking. And it must be.
