Vvvv – a live-programming environment for easy prototyping and development

Also see vvvv.js, a project that mimicks VVVV but uses the web as its platform, instead of Windows :)

http://www.vvvvjs.com/

Another powerful program along the same lines is touch designer https://www.derivative.ca

It's an offshoot of Houdini. It is exceptional at working with external hardware controllers and networking.

I've worked with a few people who use vvvv and written (is that the right verb when it's graphical language) a bunch of of vvvv nodes to integrate with other stuff I was writing for them.

It's a a powerful system and seems to really fit the minds of some very talented and creative people. As seems to be common with graphical programming things abstraction can be a little hard unless it fits into the node-with-fixed-inputs-and-outputs mold but this isn't a huge problem for the sizes of projects I saw.

The really cool thing in my opinion is the live nature, coding and runtime are the same so you can see it all running as you change thing. Fantastic for both exploratory coding and performance coding. I used it once as a front end for playing with some head tracking code I was working in in C++ and it was a fun experience, pity it's Windows only!

> As seems to be common with graphical programming things abstraction can be a little hard unless it fits into the node-with-fixed-inputs-and-outputs mold

In other words, you're trapped in a first-order box: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5157#comment-85605

Love vvvv and use it for all my graphics nonsense. The graphics is all DX9/DX11, that might be a little bit of a turnoff for the hacker news crowd, but the ability to string together and debug shaders in real-time and just generate gobs of data for visualization and interaction is unbeatable.