Selection is the key to social harmony. Surround yourself with true friends who love you just as you are. If you don't see any around, quest for them.

Bryan Caplan

Most of the comments on this thread are about people who seem to find this useful or think that this will make a difference positively. While I think the idea interesting, and would like to try it out, I am one of those who don't seem to like really bright lighting. In fact, at work, I've had some of the overhead lights removed to make it generally less bright ambiently. I tend to suffer from eyestrain or seem to get a headache, though now that I think about it, I am not sure if this was because the over head lights were reflecting badly off of my computer screen or not.

Anyway, I'd like to get the opinions of and comments from people who generally turn off lights at work (such that the ambient light source is behind the monitor) , and likewise, even better if they have tried this out.

A visual representation of objects in a programming language context must necessarily be complete descriptions of those objects; either you're switching rapidly between multiple levels of abstraction in order to perform your work, or the sheer volume of screenspace necessary to encapsulate even relatively simple programming instructions results in difficulty comprehending program flow as a singular process.

Or, to put it another way - open up a simple paint program, and try drawing out a visual-programming approach to a very simple programming problem - say, reading the first twenty entries from a database and selecting a tuple based on the highest-valued column. Make the fake program logically complete; it should encapsulate every operation and data structure necessary (although you can presuppose libraries to interact with, it should represent those libraries, as well).

This is actually a problem I've been working on on-and-off for my company; we're trying to implement a comprehensive visual editor for our program, instead of the multiple-layers-of-abstraction visual editor that exists today. As it transpires, given the vast amount of information that needs to be available, symbol encoding - memorizing the meanings of large numbers of symbols in the context of the UI - is the only effective means we've found. And at that point you're just writing a scripting language using different letters than the English ones, and what's the point?

(I downoted both comments. OrphanWilde's assertion was mostly meaningless and given without substantiation/clarification, and your reply engaged it on object level instead of pointing that out (or silently downvoting), sustaining a flawed mode of discussion. Being "non-inflammatory" is an insufficiently strict standard, a conversation should be sane.)

In case of a down vote on something that seems reasonable

Perhaps it merely indicates that the voter doesn't agree about the reasonableness. I neither voted on nor---until now---read your comment but I do note that in general many people write things that they (evidently) consider reasonable but which I consider utter nonsense and other have vehemently disagreed with (what seem to me) to be reasonable statements by myself and others. Neither objective reasonableness (to the extent that such a thing exists) nor the belief of the author will force another to perceive it as reasonable.

and/or is non-inflammatory

Not especially inflammatory, true. I note however that you opened with a contradiction, "No.". That has a clear meaning of asserting the falsity of its parent. If the parent is (perceived to be) correct then a negation may be considered sufficient to downvote the comment with or without reading the remainder.

it'd be informative if someone left a note as to why it was being down voted.

This is a true statement. Another true statement is "Writing declarations of downvotes can be perceived as a nuisance by third parties and promote emnity or at very least dowvnoting by the downvoted author. This is a negative consequence for the downvoter, who is not obliged to abandon his or her anonymity if they don't chose to."

I did. I didn't want to explain why because it's a long conversation I don't want to have, but basically I think this quote promotes a misleading conception of mathematics. For the record, Hardy is thought to have been suffering from depression when he wrote this.

Morality needs a concept of awfulness as well as awesomeness. In the depths of hell, good things are not an option and therefore not a consideration, but there are still choices to be made.