Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#151

Post by Edmond » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 1:01 AM UTC

djedr wrote: post #109

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…

Agreed, that is more or less the approach I have taken with Solvent...it has a familiar IDE environment with the additional visual layer on top of it.

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#152

Post by meredydd » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 1:08 AM UTC

pshc wrote: post #145

meredydd wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thing is, the architecture you just described is a modern IDE with refactoring etc. This is a well-trodden road. It starts with "wouldn't it be awesome if we could manipulate everything as ASTs", then usability intervenes and we fall back to "well, we need to be able to selectively edit as text", which means you need to be able to convert everything to bags of characters and back. And now you've built that conversion…

I agree with what you're saying, except the last part. Using ASTs as the source of truth (embedded in a source control forest) has benefits that are worth the difficulty.

What's the benefit? If your tooling already requires lossless round-trips to and from text, why invent a funky storage format that doesn't interoperate and can't be fixed with a text editor when it all blows up? You already have a perfect serialisation of the AST, in a format every other tool understands - that is, source code.

(And heaven forbid you should want to make a checkpoint commit that doesn't parse...)

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#153

Post by nacc » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 1:08 AM UTC

I think it really depends on the task. We are just hijacking the brain machinery to do jobs it is not evolved to deal with. If we can find some highly evolved / optimized brain function which reflects the structure of the new job, the brain can process it much more efficiently.

Text might be good for programming because, most of the programming are sequential, text is sequential, and text processing is highly optimized in the brain because language. But in fact, we also use a bit of visual programming (indentation, paragraphs) in text to reflect part of the program structure that are not sequential.

If the program is completely non-sequential, visual tools which reflects the structure of the program are going to be much better than text. For example, if you are designing a electronic circuit, you draw a circuit diagram. Describing a electronic circuit purely in text is not going to be very helpful.

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#154

Post by adamb_ » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 1:11 AM UTC

At the end of the day, programming is symbol manulation, and nothing beats representing symbols like text.

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#155

Post by rubyfan » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 1:12 AM UTC

I don't know much about how other people think but I'm fairly certain that I favor auditory mode. When I write code I generally am in auditory mode and then expressing logic becomes fairly easy with text. Further, I believe abstractions like classes and objects, etc. tend to favor text/auditory expression.

Visual programming to me becomes very scattered and fragmented. Bits and pieces of logic seem to end up all over the place and become hard to keep a cohesive functionality together.

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#156

Post by meredydd » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 1:13 AM UTC

pishpash wrote: post #137

For event-driven programming like what you describe, Visual Basic worked fine. Too bad that kind of very efficient UI building got thrown out irrationally with the hate for Visual Basic the language.

Obligatory plug: We're bringing it back!

Check out https://anvil.works - it's like VB, only for this century (the web) and using a sensible language (Python, both client and server).

We just took it to PyCon, and the reaction was pretty gratifying :)

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#157

Post by groundshop » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 1:13 AM UTC

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) does a good job of this I think. SSIS is made for manipulating data flows. The flow of data happens to be very well represented in many cases by visual network flow diagrams. Most of the common patterns of data flow are implemented as drag and drop widgets.

That said, as necessary, you can do pretty much anything in that environment as code if you want. The best thing about the language, though, is that /if/ you go down the path of coding something out instead of using a common pattern, it forces you to ask "Why am I doing something out of the norm here?" Sometimes you have a valid reason. Sometimes you don't and that question course corrects you back into a maintainable architecture. It's a very niche language (even mostly vendor locked down), but I think it's a great example of a visual programming environment that's mostly great to work in.

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#158

Post by vendiddy » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 1:22 AM UTC

One size does not fit all.

UI creation is best handled by a WYSIWYG editor, animations are nice to visualize on a timeline, and math formulas are clearest when written as is.

Picking the wrong model creates a mess. Try to express a sorting algorithm as a flowchart. It would be too difficult to follow. Yet a business process is great to model as a flowchart. A picture is only sometimes worth a thousand words.

Take a look at the papers published from VPRI, the research org founded by Alan Kay. They have built languages for graphics, parsing, stream processing--each optimized for its particular domain. They could have used a general purpose language but it would have resulted in much more code than necessary.

So the question everyone should be asking is: why hasn't a multi-paradigm programming environment taken off?

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#159

Post by lloydfischer » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 1:27 AM UTC

Way back in a previous life I made a living building a visual programming tool and language to specify simulations. After many years of work it became clear that visual programming works very well in industries that already have a well established visual paradigm. We had great success with simulating hydraulic systems by letting folks specify them with standard piping and instrumentation diagrams. The cooling system simulation for the space station simulator ended up being built that way with our system, as were many simulations of nuclear power plant cooling systems. However, after you do P&i diagrams and electronic schematics you very quickly run out of well established visual paradigms. Uml is just not useful in the way that a piping diagram is.

As to text, a colleague once described the best feature of a text specification of code was "visual rhyme". You know, when you can look at a block of code and feel how it ebbs and flows. That's from the old days, I don't know if functional code rhymes like Fortean did.

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#160

Post by sidlls » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 1:27 AM UTC

hasenj wrote: post #59

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.

Exactly! I'm actually bewildered why some people think visual programming is a good idea at all.

It's one avenue of exploration to (further) commoditize programming.