Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 325 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#101

Post by baddox »

wybiral wrote: post #94
nikofeyn wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

then why does everyone sketch a picture when trying to convey an idea? text is obviously useful but so is visual information. the complete dismissal of visual programming by text-based programmers is often infuriating. visual programming can provide an immediate indication of structure and dataflow, something that text-based languages struggle with. in my mind, the best case scenario is some sort of hybrid, where vis…

There are hybrid languages, like Python... Visual whitespace denotes blocks while visual symbols like "if", "for", and "def" denote the meaning of those blocks. (and sane programmers use visual layout to convey structure in every language)

I don't think that meaningful whitespace counts as "visual programming." That just means that a whitespace character has meaning, just like a word character or a punctuation character. It's still purely text-based. I think that "visual programming" means that the editing environment to some extent visually represents the intended outcome of the program. WYSIWYG web editing is the obvious extreme example of this. Whitespace in a Python program has no visual correlation to the output of the program.

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#102

Post by ttoinou »

VladimirGolovin wrote: post #50

Filter Forge founder here, now working on a turing-complete functional visual programming language inspired mostly by Haskell: https://imgur.com/a/HkSgJ Here's what I currently think on visual programming languages: 1. I see no place for imperative and non-pure functional languages in visual programming. 2. Pure functional languages can absolutely be implemented with visual syntax. This is just another form of repres…

Filter Forge is great. I was thinking on doing something similar and will definitely take inspiration on FF. What will be the use of your next turing complete VPL ?

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#103

Post by jerf »

Programming languages (and a lot of other things) have essential and accidental complexity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet?wprov=sfla1

Progress in programming is in removing the accidental complexity to get to the essential.

In the vast majority of domains, visual programming injects huge amounts of accidental complexity utterly irrelevant to the domain. So it isn't really surprising that despite it's superficially appealing elevator pitch and uniquely pretty demos, it doesn't appeal over the long term.

The domains where it works are those where the complexity is limited, or where the usually-accidental complexity is actually fundamental... for instance, in circuit layout the usually-accidental issues involved with layout actually correspond to something.

Visual programming is firmly established in some nights, and I expect it to stay in them indefinitely.

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#104

Post by vlaaad »

VladimirGolovin wrote: post #50

Filter Forge founder here, now working on a turing-complete functional visual programming language inspired mostly by Haskell: https://imgur.com/a/HkSgJ Here's what I currently think on visual programming languages: 1. I see no place for imperative and non-pure functional languages in visual programming. 2. Pure functional languages can absolutely be implemented with visual syntax. This is just another form of repres…

Wow, I really like it!

Although, I think your ui is too verbose. Main indicator, is, well, the size of "blocks of data", where text takes 4 times less space than visual representation. But there is also an information overload: text representation of `map` call has no indication of what kind of arguments it expects, it is implied by order of args and basically is just defined by language. I guess, visual analog of this code should follow the same trope: it should strip type annotations (which probably should be available VP IDE with a shortcut), and imply meaning of args (maybe with colors?)

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#105

Post by calebh »

Nobody here has mentioned language workbench tools, the best of which is probably Jetbrains MPS: https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/

These language workbench tools make it easy to switch between graphical and textual representations. Also you get intelligent IDE support and typechecking for free.

The primary alternatives to MPS are Xtext and Microsoft's language workbench (formerly known as Intentional Software, Microsoft just bought them).

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#106

Post by worldsayshi »

nzonbi wrote: post #45
skadamat wrote: post #20

The way people have implemented visual programming has turned out to be a bit of an oxymoron. Visual and symbolic are entirely different channels of representation & understanding (for the most part). Representing a program using lines of code and throwing some "visual magic" to spread out lines of code across a screen doesn't take advantage of what EITHER visual or symbolic manipulation has to offer. Visual programm…

I have been working on xol, a graphic based programming language. xoL is a graphic based programming language. It represents programming concepts with graphics instead of text. It is product of a long, painstaking design effort, to get an optimal graphical presentation of programs. A good description of it is available in this blog post: http://lignixz.github.io/blog/posts/17/xoL_graphics_based_pr... A partially work…

It looks kind of similar to a dream project of my own. It's a project that I've promised myself to take up on one day. I started building a prototype in haskell, with front end in Gloss. Tried to get inspiration from functional reactive programming/modelling.

I thought about using something like a prototype called Hydra (1) as a sort of runtime for evaluating graphs. Anyway, I really want to get back to it at some point but other cool things that are slightly more low hanging tends to get in the way. :)

Another nice inspiration for these things is Ecolanguage (2), not really programming related but a diagram language for visualizing economic transactions.

(1) - https://github.com/giorgidze/Hydra (2) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QI1iuAvTKE

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#107

Post by ux-app »

> Why does visual programming suck?

It doesn't? Shameless plug, I build a visual programming tool for UI design (https://www.ux-app.com/static/learn-actions-and-events.html).

It's great for a huge subset of people for whom coding is tangential to their job. Product managers, designers etc.

It's not ideal for a programmer because it's not as dense as the textual representation and once you've developed that muscle memory, typing your code is a lot quicker, but increasingly, there are a lot more people coding now who are not career programmers. For these people visual programming is great since it's less intimidating and reduces the possibility of syntax errors.

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#108

Post by pvinis »

nikofeyn wrote: post #71
Changu wrote: post #52

I think the reason is that text is already a highly optimized visual way to represent information. It started with cave paintings and evolved to what it is now. "Please go to the supermarket and get two bottles of beer. If you see Joe, tell him we are having a party in my house at 6 tomorrow." It took me a few seconds to write that. Imagine I had to paint it.

then why does everyone sketch a picture when trying to convey an idea? text is obviously useful but so is visual information. the complete dismissal of visual programming by text-based programmers is often infuriating. visual programming can provide an immediate indication of structure and dataflow, something that text-based languages struggle with. in my mind, the best case scenario is some sort of hybrid, where vis…

Check out this video. He has a nice explanation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_SvuUYQ5Fo

Basically, painting/diagram is good for more abstract overview, and text/code is for more specific instructions.

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#109

Post by djedr »

Edmond wrote: post #17

I don't think it is the paradigm that sucks but the existing implementations...it is a hard design problem to solve. No one has quite figured out the right approach....often the existing implementations make you click and fill out enough fields to make the entire exercise much worse than just coding something up in a text editor. I believe the solution lies in coming up with a way to compose pre-built components into…

> I don't think it is the paradigm that sucks but the existing implementations...it is a hard design problem to solve. No one has quite figured out the right approach....often the existing implementations make you click and fill out enough fields to make the entire exercise much worse than just coding something up in a text editor.

True. That's why a proper visual programming environment should build on existing text-based environments and offer the same capabilities while adding power. Not disregard all progress, conventions, and achievements and start form scratch offering some unique features, but at the same time taking away stuff that's already been figured out.

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#110

Post by [deleted] »

Changu wrote: post #52

I think the reason is that text is already a highly optimized visual way to represent information. It started with cave paintings and evolved to what it is now. "Please go to the supermarket and get two bottles of beer. If you see Joe, tell him we are having a party in my house at 6 tomorrow." It took me a few seconds to write that. Imagine I had to paint it.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN