Programming today exercises our symbolic reasoning. We write code—a sequence of symbols—in a text editor.

But when we explain ideas to colleagues, we don’t just speak words, we draw diagrams and gesture with our hands. We augment the symbolic channel with a spatial channel.

How can we communicate programs to a computer over a spatial channel?

Shadershop is an interface for programming GPU shaders in the mode of a direct manipulation image editor like Photoshop. It is an experiment in leveraging the programmer’s spatial reasoning the way that coding today leverages the programmer’s symbolic reasoning.