DEV Community

Discussion on: Should programming languages be made for IDEs rather than humans?

Collapse
 
jondea profile image
Jonathan Deakin • Edited

Mathematica notebooks are very much what you are describing, but, as several people have said already, this approach has several drawbacks. Most importantly they are hard to version control but they also tie you to a specific editor which is may be laggy or unpredictable. In practice, I tend to avoid notebooks and instead write scripts when I want to use Mathematica.

Perhaps a partial solution is to use more unicode, in Julia for example you can write things like √(x^2+y^2). Some other languages also support unicode to varying degrees too.