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Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

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Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#251

Post by minademian »

nichochar wrote: post #207
kbuchanan wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this statement, wholeheartedly. I do, however, think programming languages could benefit from more visual augmentation . A program, over time, takes on more complexity than a programmer can hold in his mind, and eventually, the program's design will elude him. A disconnect appears between the text he types in the moment and the original design of the program. The sum total of the program's code no longer…

This is, I think, the idea behind IDEs

Yeah. I feel like the depth of OP's writeup blurs the lines between working with an application framework, API, and IDEs. I was under the impression that visual programming is different from IDEs or frameworks...

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#252

Post by fsloth »

baddox wrote: post #97
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…

> then why does everyone sketch a picture when trying to convey an idea? Does everyone do that? I think I very rarely do. When I need to convey an idea on a whiteboard, it's still almost completely text, with a few extra symbols like directional arrows that I think are still effectively just symbolic written language. Literally the only time I can remember sketching a picture to convey an idea is while playing Pictio…

Pictures are a mission critical for my thinking and my communication in software engineering.

I would be hard pressed to discus the operation of any sort of datastructure beyond a linked list without sketching. For example a binary tree and it's traversal routines are (at least to me) much easier to understand with a picture along side the exact state.

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#253

Post by laythea »

kbuchanan wrote: post #195
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,…

I agree with this statement, wholeheartedly. I do, however, think programming languages could benefit from more visual augmentation . A program, over time, takes on more complexity than a programmer can hold in his mind, and eventually, the program's design will elude him. A disconnect appears between the text he types in the moment and the original design of the program. The sum total of the program's code no longer…

I agree because I hate the pain of debugging. I disagree because if something takes that away, then where is the skill in my work?

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#256

Post by simonh »

A picture might be worth a thousand words, but if I give you a thousand word essay there's no way you'll find any number of pictures that fully express it.

Text is hugely expressive and can be precise and unambiguous in ways visual information struggles with.

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#258

Post by aargh_aargh »

vosper wrote: post #217
kbuchanan wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this statement, wholeheartedly. I do, however, think programming languages could benefit from more visual augmentation . A program, over time, takes on more complexity than a programmer can hold in his mind, and eventually, the program's design will elude him. A disconnect appears between the text he types in the moment and the original design of the program. The sum total of the program's code no longer…

I have a dream that one day we'll collectively realize that "buying programmers the best tools" means the most powerful, and not the shiniest. Then we'll all be running ultra-wide monitors with room for many different visual aides on the one screen, backed by the CPU horsepower (overclocked and liquid cooled, if necessary) to make it all fast. And, hopefully, we'll see what an IDE can really be.

My dream is the opposite. Constrain programmers to hardware that's 2 generations old. That will force us to make our programs run fast in this environment which is much closer to what actual users will use to running it.

I do understand the implication that lowering the need for always faster hardware for end users will slow down the pace of development of new hardware. But with the end of Moore's law upon us, that's inevitable anyway.

Our computers are plenty fast today, beyond what we could imagine when each of us started programming. Let's cut down on abstractions. Let's profile, optimize.

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#260

Post by dennisgorelik »

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…

If we need code (in form of text) anyway, then why even spend time on learning visual representation of the same concepts? Such learning is pricy and increases cognitive load on developer without meaningful increase in productivity.

Visual programming still may make sense in some narrow niche tasks though.

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