Visual Programming – Why It’s a Bad Idea

Alan Kay wrote some interesting stuff about some of the inspirations for "Tile-" and "Block-Based Programming", like "Thinkin' Things", in a discussion about the Snap! visual programming language!

https://snap.berkeley.edu

From: Alan Kay Date: Thu, 3 May 2018 07:49:16 +0000 (UTC) Subject: Re: Blocky + Micropolis = Blockropolis! ;)

Yes, all of these "blocks" editors sprouted from the original one I designed for Etoys* more than 20 years ago now -- most of the followup was by way of Jens Moenig -- who did SNAP. You can see Etoys demoed on the OLPC in my 2007 TED talk.

I'd advise coming up with a special kid's oriented language for your SimCity/Metropolis system and then render it in "blocks".

Cheers

Alan

------------- * Two precursors for DnD programming were in my grad student's -- Mike Travers -- MIT thesis (not quite the same idea), and in the "Thinking Things" parade programming system (again, just individual symbol blocks rather than expressions).

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From: Don Hopkins Date: Fri, 4 May 2018 00:43:56 +0200 Subject: Re: Blocky + Micropolis = Blockropolis! ;)

I love fondly remember and love Thinkin’ Things 1, but I never saw the subsequent versions!

But there’s a great demo on youtube! https://youtu.be/gCFNUc10Vu8?t=24m58s

That would be a great way to program SimCity builder “agents” like the bulldozer and road layer, as well as agents like PacMan who know how to follow roads and eat traffic!

I am trying to get my head around Snap by playing around with it and watching Jens’s youtube videos, and it’s dawning on me that that it’s full blown undiluted Scheme with continuations and visual macros plus the best ideas of Squeak! The concept of putting a “ring” around blocks to make them a first class function, and being able to define your own custom blocks that take bodies of block code as parameters like real Lisp macros is brilliant! That is what I’ve been dreaming about and wondering how to do for so long! Looks like he nailed it! ;)

Here’s something I found that you wrote about tile programming six years ago.

-Don

Squeak-dev:

http://squeak-dev.squeakfoundation.narkive.com/7ZN0H3vt/etoy....

Etoys, Alice and tile programming ajbn at cin.ufpe.br () 6 years ago

Folks,

I have been trying the new version of Alice . It also uses tile programming like Etoys.Just for curiosity, does anyone know the history of Tile Programming? TIA,

Antonio Barros PhD Student Informatics Center Federal University of Pernambuco Brazil

Alan Kay 6 years ago

This particular strand starting with one of the projects I saw in the CDROM "Thinking Things" (I think it was the 3rd in the set). This project was basically about being able to march around a football field and the multiple marchers were controlled by a very simple tile based programming system. Also, a grad student from a number of years ago, Mike Travers, did a really excellent thesis at MIT about enduser programming of autonomous agents -- the system was called AGAR -- and many of these ideas were used in the Vivarium project at Apple 15 years ago. The thesis version of AGAR used DnD tiles to make programs in Mike's very powerful system.

The etoys originated as a design I did to make a nice constructive environment for the internet -- the Disney Family.com site -- in which small projects could make by parents and kids working together. SqC made the etoys ideas work, and Kim Rose and teacher BJ Conn decided to see how they would work in a classroom. I thought the etoys lacked too many features to be really good in a classroom, but I was wrong. The small number of features and the ease of use turned out to be real virtues.

We've been friends with Randy Pausch for a long time and have had a number of outstanding interns from his group at CMU over the years. For example, Jeff Pierce (now a prof at GaTech) did SqueakAlice working with Andreas Raab to tie it to Andreas' Balloon3D. Randy's group got interested in the etoys tile scripting and did a very nice variant (it's rather different from etoys, and maybe better).

Cheers,

Alan

Flow-based programming is visual - http://www.jpaulmorrison.com/fbp/

I think that's splitting hairs.

We all understand the difference between "texual" and "manipulating colored boxes, drawing arrows and generally using a non-textual interface". I'd rather we addressed this rather than the accuracy of the author's wording...

I partially agree with the author in that programming is inherently complex, and that "visual" UIs are inadequate once the program reaches a sufficient complexity level. Also, textual manipulation tools tend to be ubiquitous and more importantly, non-propietary; I'm naturally wary of other tools.

I disagree with the author in that I think there's still room for exploring graphical UIs.

Exactly this. The best example here is NodeRed, Javascript underneath and a dataflow UI on top.

You can get connectors for pretty much anything eg. Raspberry pi robot/ home automation, twitter, http, email, mqtt, SQL, openCV, parallel processing.

The dashboard allows you to create UIs visually, and I've ported it to run on Android + IOS:

https://github.com/alexisread/noreml

I call it a toy because that's what it is. It's used almost exclusively to bypass doing things the right way. As you highlight quite well with your example.