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Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

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Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#301

Post by seanmcdirmid »

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…

There is a huge difference between direct manipulation of concrete concepts, and graphical manipulation of abstract code. Visual programming works much better with the former than the latter.

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#302

Post by ttoinou »

kilon wrote: post #230
ttoinou wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your example are great but it seems theses VPL succeeded because the data manipulated was constant (sound OR texture OR 3D object) in a whole project

in 3d and Audio the data is anything BUT constant. You will have to be more specific than that because I do not understand what you mean. Anything can be turned off and on.

I meant the input and output of nodes. The main thing a VST oriented VPL does is manipulating audio samples so the graph is easier to use and reason about than a generic VPL (domain specific VPL seem to thrive, I wouldn't say the same thing for generic VPLs)

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#303

Post by ttoinou »

VladimirGolovin wrote: post #203
ttoinou wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

It's intended for a Filter Forge sequel. The main pillars will be Turing-completeness and GPU support (implemented via a separate node-based DSL).

Great ! That's exactly what I want to do, a FF for GLSL :D

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#304

Post by TuringTest »

killin_dan wrote: post #231
baddox wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Godel, Escher, Bach covers this in great detail. Symbols are a weird idea in the human brain, and there are multiple pseudo languages throughout the book that when you really sit down and think about it, aren't any less ridiculous than the notation we use for mathematics outside of that book. My idea-book (is that a crazy person thing?) is probably a lot like what you're talking about. I use words for my main data, d…

> Write fibonacci(N) in ANY visual language, and tell me you couldn't have done it easier, faster, and more coherently in python or whatever. It's obvious.

  [0]   [1]    [x]
   |_____|(+)___↑ ...

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#305

Post by DonaldFisk »

jononor wrote: post #281
gwbas1c wrote: post #189

This was an active area of study in the 80s, with many journal publications. The goal was to make programming intuitive. Then one day someone published an article explaining that we need words to represent variables, doing it visually runs out of abstractions too quickly to do anything useful. There were no journal publications after. It's been about 14 years since I last looked at these publications and my memory is…

In dataflow programming, and some variations of functional programming, variables are pretty rare. But I'd be interested in reading the study you refer, do you know how to find it?

In dataflow programming, variables are unnecessary.

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#306

Post by DonaldFisk »

nikofeyn wrote: post #85

i think most people that have an opinion on visual programming have not actually ever used a visual programming language in earnest. i have worked in labview very seriously over the past 4-5 years. at this point, i am essentially an expert in the language. i have done object-oriented programming (OOP), functional programming, and also programmed using an actor framework. all of that is in addition to obviously adopti…

I don't encounter people, either IRL or online, with significant experience in LabVIEW, or other visual dataflow languages. I wonder if you could give me feedback on my own visual dataflow language, described in http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/fmj/FMJ.html

Though I haven't updated the web pages, the language is still evolving, and not yet ready for release.

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#307

Post by DonaldFisk »

adamb_ wrote: post #154

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

No mainstream programming language even supports symbols as a data type. They process numbers and strings of characters.

Symbol manipulation is done well only by Lisp and its variants.

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#308

Post by DonaldFisk »

kilon wrote: post #22

Every time a VPL (Visual Programming Language) has gone against a TPL (text programming language) , VPL not only has come out a winner it has massacred its opponent. There are 3 areas that I am aware of that VPLs have appeared a) modular audio synthesis b) 3d graphics c) game programming (a) has been the first with origins back to 1995 , there are like a ton of programming apis for building modular synthesizers , the…

Thanks, very informative. If you implement a visual language, you also have to implement the means to input your code, i.e. you have to implement not just a language, but also an IDE.

The other thing to note is that hardware had influenced programming languages, which in turn have influenced hardware, in the direction of SISD on CPUs and later SIMD on GPUs. But textual languages are poorly suited, and visual languages well-suited, for representing dataflow. In the 1970s and 1980s, there was active research on dataflow hardware as well as work on (mostly textual) dataflow languages. Now, CPU speeds are no longer improving exponentially as they were in the past, so dataflow should be re-examined.

I've been working on my own visual dataflow language (http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/fmj/FMJ.html). I haven't updated the pages for some time, but big changes are under way.

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#309

Post by DonaldFisk »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #191

It is unproductive. You waste time managing a 2D representation for little benefit. It's hard to do meaningful diffs and merging needed for revision control. You can program FPGAs in 2D with schematic entry. It is a huge time sink for anything non-trivial which is why few bother with it these days.

> It's hard to do meaningful diffs and merging needed for revision control.

That's because existing revision control tools are specifically designed for textual languages, therefore unsuited to graphical ones. There's no reason why graphical equivalents can't be implemented.

Re: Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

#310

Post by lispm »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #307
adamb_ wrote: post #154

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

No mainstream programming language even supports symbols as a data type. They process numbers and strings of characters. Symbol manipulation is done well only by Lisp and its variants.

Javascript (with ECMAScript 6) supports symbols as a datatype.
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