81–90 of 107 posts
At work we use a blend of C++ with Unreal Engine's visual programming language Blueprints. I am going to be honest with you guys here: I love blueprints. They are very limited compared, lacking even maps. When it comes to connecting existing behavior together they are king. Consider the parts of game development which cannot be made generic. By sticking those in Blueprints we get nice high level code.
Another problem is how to explore and manipulate a flow graph? I like the idea of using a force directed graph. Here is one, where I mapped a visual music synthesizer to Jeffry Heer's Prefuse toolkit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a703TTbxghc
Would love to explore authoring flow, using force directed graphs on an iPad pro + pencil (and its ilk), where one could not only draw arc between nodes, but also between convex hulls of a collection of nodes.
IMO, Visual programming does not have a proper definition yet. Coding frontend and coding backend are altogether two different things and sometimes users confuse the application of visual authoring (programming) in one area with the other. But I believe it is the future. I bet you won't be carrying your laptop, enslaved by the physical keyboard, which is necessary for traditional 'coding' with you in 2030. You would…
I disagree. I wouldn't have thought that Microsoft, author of Visual Basic, would be basically forced in 2015 to add improvements to their console system -- but here we are. If anything text-based programming is more prominent now than in the last 10 years.
> You would be dragging and dropping stuff, perhaps in Virtual reality headset or through voice or gesture to build what you want, just like you would author in a visual platform like Adobe illustrator or in a 3d authoring tool.
Your arms will get very tired.
> but authoring business logic is highly effective in Visual programming.
I disagree. We have one giant visual-programmed workflow solution and it's a very modern and powerful system but it's also insane to work with. You can describe the problem in text with much clearer than trying to follow a diagram that won't fit on a dozen screens in either direction.
> Reason - Visual authoring tools are highly expensive and hence are confined to fortune 500 companies.
They are snake-oil; nearly something you can only sell for millions of dollars to people who make billions of dollars. You need a team of highly paid expert consultants to make changes because nobody else knows these systems or wants to know them. It's like going back 30 years in terms of expressive power.
Can't communicate visually. The translation between written and spoken words, even made up technical words, is fast, accurate, unambiguous. Visual means slow, inaccurate, ambiguous, which is sometimes cool for art, but not for communication. It would be like trying to program musically, or by touch, or by (oh no) smell. There is also the productivity danger of futzing, or whatever the modern term is. In the early des…
Except we can perfectly communicate visually, and we do it all the time. It is common to draw diagrams when you are trying to understand or explain a problem. If you want to give somebody a rough idea of how your program works, it is infinitely more likely that you use some kind of drawing than music, touch or smell. I don't agree neither with visual programming inviting people to lose time in details. The same you d…
The only time we generally communicate visually is when we want to express something with less detail (e.g. charts, diagrams, graphs, emoji, etc).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm actually reading this article while in a two-day introduction to PLC programming. It's been pretty fascinating, and is an interesting view into earlier days of programming... ...From here, I definitely feel like there's something "we" missed in how these systems work, and the situations they describe. But there's also a great deal that they've missed - and are stuck in the 80s. I think the big one is that these s…
> stigmergy This is a new word for me—thanks :-)
I'm currently working on a developer tool that leverages the advantages of visualization not for writing source code, but for navigation and understanding. Coati, a source explorer for C/C++, combines graph visualization and source code interactively. The graph makes it easy to see what relationships a class or a function has, while the code still provides all the details of the implementation. https://www.coati.io/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPL_Research