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

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#241

Post by icebraining » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 7:41 AM UTC

eriknstr wrote: post #118

icebraining wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Blueprints have really become the default in Unreal, why are they so barely talked about? Searching for "unreal blueprints" on Google returns less than two full pages. Do you work in the industry?

If I go to the last page of a Google search for unreal blueprints it says that it showed me 120 results. 12 pages. If I go to the last page of a Google search for C++, it says that it showed me 180 results. 18 pages. It used to be that Google would tell you an approximation of how many matches they actually had in total for a search of their index but they no longer do anywhere that I am aware of. If there were only…

Regarding Google's search, fair enough, but I did actually only get two pages (though I have it configured for more results per page).

YouTube's search is wonky, after a few pages it starts to omit words. I got a video for a blueprint of a building (no "unreal" mentioned anywhere).

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#242

Post by AriaMinaei » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 7:48 AM UTC

devcriollo wrote: post #182

"Text is the most socially useful communication technology. It works well in 1:1, 1:N, and M:N modes. It can be indexed and searched efficiently, even by hand. It can be translated. It can be produced and consumed at variable speeds. It is asynchronous. It can be compared, diffed, clustered, corrected, summarized and filtered algorithmically. It permits multiparty editing. It permits branching conversations, lurking,…

"This is so bad, it's not even wrong."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#243

Post by heisenbit » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 8:00 AM UTC

mvindahl wrote: post #113

I think visual programming is one of those ideas that intuitively seems like a good idea but never is. Thus, it never really dies, it just gets picked up as a kind of rite-of-passage by new generations of developers. Managers also tend to like the concept as it would allow them to bypass the pesky code monkeys and just feed their drawings to the computer. For my master's thesis, some 15 years ago, I programmed a syst…

> That being said, I think visual tools can be a good fit for tasks whose output is UI. There are applications and frameworks that allow you to drag'n'drop to compose the UI, but the code is still written in a text editor. This can work reasonably well.

Even there some people claim it works better for micro scale: widgets are ok but larger scale composition (storyboards, composing dynamic views from re-usable sub-views) are better done in code.

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#244

Post by futhey » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 8:01 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #236

danblick wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as we're speculating: I kind of dream that maybe we'll see programming environments that take advantage of VR. Humans are really good at remembering spaces. ("Describe for me your childhood bedroom." or "What did your third grade teacher look like?") There's already the idea of "memory palaces" [1] suggesting you can take advantage of spatial memory for other purposes. I wonder, what would it be like to learn…

> Humans are really good at remembering spaces. ("Describe for me your childhood bedroom." or "What did your third grade teacher look like?") Some humans. I honestly can't answer you those two questions. I'm much better in remembering what I just read than what space I just saw, and I absolutely suck at remembering (not to mention describing) faces. If you mugged me I probably wouldn't be able to describe you to poli…

I have face blindness. You may as well, or at least some degree of aphantasia.

No reason for concern, but there is supposedly an incredibly low occurrence of either.

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#245

Post by jmts » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 8:02 AM UTC

I did some work with webMethods Flow in a previous job. I hated it. Aside from the fact that it was slow from a point-and-click point of view, the interface was generally slow, and navigation and search were generally tiresome. To my memory it was not possible to have related flows side-by-side for reference, and much of it was abstracted to a high enough level simply due to language features that it was difficult to identify patterns and idioms within a set of logic at a glance. This also meant that any opportunities for refactoring or code reuse were few not only because it was difficult to do, but also because they were difficult to see.

Much of this can probably be improved in the IDE, and it is possible that there were issues simply because we may have been abusing it (there other platforms/languages that were being used beyond their original design).

What little I've seen of LabVIEW at my current job suggests that it has a more usable interface, however having written DLLs to be used by LabVIEW, it still appears to be quite restrictive at a language design level which I expect would still limit its usefulness (I hear regular talk of the use of singletons, users appear to be required to translate a C API to LabVIEW manually, useful C language features like structs and function pointers don't appear to have any support, the ability to maintain a reference to a context pointer gives rise to groaning developers).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebMethods_Flow

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#246

Post by kwhitefoot » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 8:05 AM UTC

karmelapple wrote: post #211

nichochar wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is, I think, the idea behind IDEs

Yet which IDEs aren't simply really nice text editors with some refactoring help built in? Making these visualizations central to the IDE would be exciting.

> Yet which IDEs aren't simply really nice text editors with some refactoring help built in?

All the IDEs I use are more like:

    Yet which IDEs aren't simply really _horrible_ text editors with some refactoring help built in?

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#247

Post by flukus » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 8:06 AM UTC

radva42 wrote: post #24

I've been working on a project that does exactly what you described for the last few years. IMHO vue.js/react really changed the game here, especially for CRUD apps. For example what I did was to code a server part in golang and use vue.js on the frontend and for the app builder. Using the web-based app builder (also 100% vue) the user can design forms. The forms are stored as serialized JSON in the database and the…

> I think that drag-n-drop builders are definitely coming and will probably eliminate the need to write such apps in coming years.

People were saying that 10 years ago, they were saying it 20 years ago, the general attitude was even the inspiration for COBOL (that business people could write their own apps). Every single time it ends up being a disaster when it comes to slightly non-trivial use cases.

It's been tried and failed by companies large and small for decades. So what do you know or do differently that they didn't?

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#248

Post by Qantourisc » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 8:08 AM UTC

lithos wrote: post #26

It doesn't. The electrical world has been using contactor diagrams for complex logic for decades, and with the inclusion of more advanced computer components ladder logic (still the same concepts, symbols and logic) https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/worksheets/ac-motor-control... is the link I quickly found. It's typical to see a handful of symbols handle what would take a hundred of lines of code for the level of use…

Difference here is, we are using humans to fill in the gaps. With visual programming, we either still have to draw the exact wire-diagrams, or exactly define the function of a symbol.

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#249

Post by Qantourisc » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 8:12 AM UTC

richard_shelton wrote: post #46

I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. Look at complex CAD systems and editors. They focused on the visual side and still provide some kind of command line for scripting the things. Even in pure visual programming systems like PD you can type algebraic expressions in textual form. And in text-based systems you may have lots of 2d tables (Smalltalk), graphs of modules, semantic colors (colorForth) etc. Imagine…

I agree on this point, the best solution is probably a visual editor that convert code to graphs an visa versa (while really working in code internally). Then users can switch when needed.

Also it will help explore/understand what is required to write and effective base/methods/approaches for visual programming.

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#250

Post by gryfft » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 8:13 AM UTC

AriaMinaei wrote: post #242

devcriollo wrote: post #182

"Text is the most socially useful communication technology. It works well in 1:1, 1:N, and M:N modes. It can be indexed and searched efficiently, even by hand. It can be translated. It can be produced and consumed at variable speeds. It is asynchronous. It can be compared, diffed, clustered, corrected, summarized and filtered algorithmically. It permits multiparty editing. It permits branching conversations, lurking,…

"This is so bad, it's not even wrong." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong

Would you mind enlightening me as to the fallacy you perceive in that post? It seems well-formed to me.