If we ever meet an advanced alien society, I really want to see what solutions they came up with for:
Configuration languages
GUI frameworks
Because those two areas seem like there will never be a “perfect” solution.
And to anyone that says “an alien society might be so different that they don’t have those things”, I think if you’ve invented computers then at some point you will want some way to configure them, and some way to interact with programs running on them.
If they navigate programs entirely by sound or some shit, that’d still be interesting to see.
Watch it turn out that most advanced alien societies just use the terminal.
Then it turns out the reason they are exploring the depths of space is to see if any other civilizations have figured out a better way to handle those things because their current solutions work but kinda suck (along with several other problems we can’t yet fathom). And worse, they get excited when you start describing our systems.
“Wait wait wait, please tell me more about this… stack… that allows you to reuse code with different initial values for variables. That sounds revolutionary!”
Excellent observation. I’m honestly surprised there’s no well-known “universal parser” for common languages that can handle JSON, YAML, TOML, maybe even some form of XML, etc.
If we ever meet an advanced alien society, I really want to see what solutions they came up with for:
Because those two areas seem like there will never be a “perfect” solution.
And to anyone that says “an alien society might be so different that they don’t have those things”, I think if you’ve invented computers then at some point you will want some way to configure them, and some way to interact with programs running on them.
If they navigate programs entirely by sound or some shit, that’d still be interesting to see.
Watch it turn out that most advanced alien societies just use the terminal.
Then it turns out the reason they are exploring the depths of space is to see if any other civilizations have figured out a better way to handle those things because their current solutions work but kinda suck (along with several other problems we can’t yet fathom). And worse, they get excited when you start describing our systems.
“Wait wait wait, please tell me more about this… stack… that allows you to reuse code with different initial values for variables. That sounds revolutionary!”
Excellent observation. I’m honestly surprised there’s no well-known “universal parser” for common languages that can handle JSON, YAML, TOML, maybe even some form of XML, etc.