This seems wrong. A view of your program is 1d. Conceptualizing a program is often n-dimensional. This is a large part of the difficulty. And is why some visualizations work. They effectively act as dimensional reductions, and draw on known visual metaphors.
That was exactly the point I was trying to make. If you have a 2D problem and you want to represent it in today's commonly used code you either
1) flatten it down to 1D (e.g. a table becomes a JSON array of objects)
2) move it into a higher dimensional structure like a database. Now you have two problems.
If your programming paradigm supports higher dimensions to tackle your problems, it just gives you a higher level platform to start tackling your problems. Before you could maybe deal with 4 dimensions at the same time at most, now you can deal with up to 5 or even 6 - we don't yet know what new solutions to problems smart people could come up with when being given such tools.
Just as an example, how often do you see binary logic problems in the form of complex if-then-else procedural structures - what if you could represent two decision factors in a tabular form and let the IDE work out the missing cases for you? That's one of the ideas behind subtext.
Point is I think we agree - if you think I'm fundamentally wrong I'd like to know more exactly where.
I guess I just don't agree that those are your only two options. Consider, a nested JSON structure is essentially N-dimensional. Even something as simple as a list of people is effectively multidimensional. You have the dimension of the list, and then you have the dimension of the the structure representing the people. Which, itself, my have multiple dimensions.
Depends on the program. Anything you use to "index" into data is effectively a dimension. This is obvious with arrays, since you can have multidimensional arrays. However, even structs can just be seen as arrays with symbolic indexes. Usually bound by a given cardinality.
