Text-Orientation

Text-orientation is the principle of perceiving the computer as a text machine. A computer system stores and transforms text, being text the structure behind many phenomenons, such as natural language sentences, programming languages, mathematics, and many more, including graphics, music and in general all kinds of digital media. The previously introduced concept of text can probably theoretically be improved, but it already shows that it is possible to reduce many different things to a simple algebraic text structure. The fact that syntax analysis, knowledge, mathematics and digital media can also be recorded as text, shows that text is a far more general structure as commonly thought of and it is not confined to writings. That is why I mean that computers are text machines. You can apply computing to anything, as far as you can record it as text. The verb digitalize is used in particular for recording media, but the operation taking place is exactly the same that happens say when you put data about customers and orders into a database. You reduce a complex phenomenon to a logical expression consisting of some symbols and some relationships between them. That is, you reduce it to text.

This principle indicates some chances. If we find out a general text structure suitable for representing real-life software structures in every computing field, then we can construct computer systems where all data structures and procedures are perfectly integrated with each other, because a underlying text-engine ties all of them together. The user does not need to be aware of this inner structure. The occasional user of a user-friendly text-oriented system still sees different parts with different look and feel, but the system is grounded on a unified layer underneath some separate presentation layers. The more skilled the user is, the more she understands the underlying logic and the more means she has to interact with the system through distinct interfaces for querying and transforming data.

This applies to every field one uses computers for, including software development. Understanding the whole software as text leads to the definitive separation from specification and implementation the computing field has longed for. It makes also possible to construct far more flexible and scalable development systems than today's ones that put unprecedented power at the fingertips of highly skilled people.

Specification and Implementation

An implementation of text can certainly be useful, and it can provide services that otherwise do not exist. But the full power of text lies in its adoption for specification purposes. The key aspect of text-oriented programming is being aware that software is text, along with a fundamental, general concept of text that makes it possible to express every text in terms of it.

The other programming paradigms determine what the basic elements of ”the world“ are. For example the object-oriented paradigm states that there are objects that exchange messages, the relational model states that there are domains and relationships between them. Note that this is the base architecture of all software systems that are build on them. Not only this, they need run-time support: objects have to be allocated, messages must be passed, and the relational model needs even a dedicated monolithic server application.

The text-oriented paradigm is entirely different. It does not say anything about how ”the world“ is, but about our description of it. Text-oriented software development does not determine an architecture of the software to be build and it has as a matter of principle no run time effects at all. Text-orientation refers to the structure of the source code, neither to the structure of the executable binary files nor the structure of the running processes.

You cannot describe a running relational database in terms of object-orientation, it simply does not match the schema. You also cannot describe an object-oriented user interface in terms of tables and queries. But you can describe both of them and in fact every other system in terms of text-orientation.

All other software paradigms are implementation paradigms, on the contrary text-orientation is a specification paradigm. That means also: text-orientation does not replace the other programming paradigms; it furnishes a ground for each of them and integrates them all in a consistent whole.