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Visual Programming – Why It’s a Bad Idea

mikehadlow.blogspot.com

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Re: Visual Programming – Why It’s a Bad Idea

#101

Post by detaro »

jki275 wrote: post #100
stinos wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't get why you call it a toy, or just for prototypes. Maybe think somewhat broader and not just about the bad experience(s) you had with it. For the things it's good at, it just works and it's pretty hard to find alternatives (well, Measurement Studio is ok, but for simple things it's usually still a bit more work than Labview). The hard part is figuring out what Labview is good at and not make the mistake…

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.

What's "the right way"? Spending an extra few days on making your own visualization code, throwing away flexibility in the process?

Re: Visual Programming – Why It’s a Bad Idea

#102

Post by sigsergv »

mmsimanga wrote: post #66
topkai22 wrote: post #17

Visual programming languages will only take you so far, but often that is far enough. What the author misses is that we as professional programmers miss the success stories, because we only get called in when the boundaries have been reached. In my career I’ve often been asked to rewrite Access DBs, InfoPath forms, or SharePoint sites developed by amateurs into something more usable. My early reactions where along th…

To add, can you imagine if IT had to develop every single application the business thought up? They would never cope. I think Access, InfoPath and CMS systems like Drupal allow business to create prototypes. Once the application has been validated and becomes business critical then IT can take over and develop a "proper" application. It makes sense to use a visual programming language to create basic CRUD application…

Prototype is not enough. Prototype is backed by some analytics that usually hidden or omitted. And “decoding” prototype app to create “real” app may take a lot of time.

Re: Visual Programming – Why It’s a Bad Idea

#103

Post by jonkalb »

lucozade wrote: post #40
jacinabox wrote: post #2

In order to make a serious comparison of textual and visual programming, you'd be better off using a serious system such as Labview for the comparison, not a... toy for children.

I was very impressed by Mark Elendt's talk at CppCon about the Houdini system. It contains a very sophisticated visual programming "language". My view on this is that text is one of the best media we have for representing precise, information dense data. What I got from the Houdini presentation was that, when someone is trained to produce precise, information rich data using other media e.g. artists then other repres…

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YXwg0n9e7E

Re: Visual Programming – Why It’s a Bad Idea

#104

Post by topkai22 »

barberousse wrote: post #25
topkai22 wrote: post #17

Visual programming languages will only take you so far, but often that is far enough. What the author misses is that we as professional programmers miss the success stories, because we only get called in when the boundaries have been reached. In my career I’ve often been asked to rewrite Access DBs, InfoPath forms, or SharePoint sites developed by amateurs into something more usable. My early reactions where along th…

I think the broader, opposing point you bring out is that visual programming is perfectly suitable for specific scopes of computational modeling, and that's just because they're DSLs, and we already know DSLs are the right choice for a number of problems. I'd like to know who the author things they're engaging with on the points they're making.

I don’t want to beat the author up too much- the over application of CASE tools in the 90s was a real thing, and I have less than fond memories of being forced to use a VPL when it really wasn’t the appropriate solution.

A good professional programmer will feel (and in fact be) constrained and slower by a VPL. That’s frustrating and likely a misuse of resources. I just think the author missed the point that VPLs generally aren’t for “us”, they are for people who something else for a living.

Re: Visual Programming – Why It’s a Bad Idea

#105

Post by brokenmachine »

alephr wrote: post #55

This article is poorly researched (the only "visual" tool it mentions is scratch???) and pretty lazy in considering the merits of extratextual programming. It's worrying that something of this quality resonates with people.

> It's worrying that something of this quality resonates with people.

I wouldn't be worried about that. Just because people are reading it doesn't mean they are agreeing with the conclusion. It's all just stuff to think about.

Where it becomes worrying is when people vote for something of that quality.

Re: Visual Programming – Why It’s a Bad Idea

#106

Post by ebcode »

DonHopkins wrote: post #84
nradov wrote: post #28

Going from text to visual programming only takes you from (sort of) one dimension up to two dimensions. That isn't much of an advantage for complex code where the "dimensionality" (for lack of a better term) is much higher than 2D. Perhaps the growth of VR and other 3D interfaces will breathe new life into visual programming?

David Ackley, who developed the two-dimensional CA-like "Moveable Feast Machine" architecture for "Robust First Computing", touched on moving from 2D to 3D in his retirement talk: https://youtu.be/YtzKgTxtVH8?t=3780 "Well 3D is the number one question. And my answer is, depending on what mood I'm in, we need to crawl before we fly." "Or I say, I need to actually preserve one dimension to build the thing and fix it. I…

Thanks for sharing these links. I first came across David Ackley watching the Artificial Life II Video proceedings from 1992, where he was demoing an agent-based simulator. So it's interesting (and quite amazing) to see how far his research has expanded in the past 26 years.

Re: Visual Programming – Why It’s a Bad Idea

#107

Post by mmsimanga »

sigsergv wrote: post #102
mmsimanga wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add, can you imagine if IT had to develop every single application the business thought up? They would never cope. I think Access, InfoPath and CMS systems like Drupal allow business to create prototypes. Once the application has been validated and becomes business critical then IT can take over and develop a "proper" application. It makes sense to use a visual programming language to create basic CRUD application…

Prototype is not enough. Prototype is backed by some analytics that usually hidden or omitted. And “decoding” prototype app to create “real” app may take a lot of time.

In my experience, people have more ideas than we have developers to implement every idea. It is very hard to work out if an idea is a good idea or not before you implement it.

You cannot implement a system for every idea because you will not have enough developers and you will waste time implementing ideas that sound good but are useless. Visual Programming applications like Access allow less technical users to implement their ideas. Some of these ideas will go nowhere. This is fine because you will not have wasted developer resources. Some of these Access applications will solve genuine business problems. It may be difficult to decipher them but it is no more difficult than trying to figure out what users want. At least in this instance, you have an application you can test against.

Re: Visual Programming – Why It’s a Bad Idea

#108

Post by alexis_read »

alexis_read wrote: post #98
quangio wrote: post #24

I personally think node based programming is suitable for DSL, high level plumbing, data visualization (imagine Jupyter cells but having branches). The best visual programming language is UE4 Blueprint: prototype quickly, great debugging experience (great tooling in general), communicate with C++ easily, intellisense... It's really productive to glue stuff together but not that helpful for "drawing" all the core logi…

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

EDIT: Ran out of time to finish the comment:

Allowing this to run on mobile means that you can develop/monitor systems on mobile, cluster the systemsphone with other nodered instances, and develop mobile apps (the package is basically nodeJs, nodered and a cordova webview which can be hooked up to display the nodered dashboard).

The important things to note here are that the underlying language to the visual DSL is flexible enough to do everything, and standard ways of building visual extensions (aka nodes) exist.

The main thing missing on the Dashboard is a table node, which would allow a much more flexible layout of data (sorting, trees etc).

Re: Visual Programming – Why It’s a Bad Idea

#109

Post by stinos »

jki275 wrote: post #100
stinos wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't get why you call it a toy, or just for prototypes. Maybe think somewhat broader and not just about the bad experience(s) you had with it. For the things it's good at, it just works and it's pretty hard to find alternatives (well, Measurement Studio is ok, but for simple things it's usually still a bit more work than Labview). The hard part is figuring out what Labview is good at and not make the mistake…

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.

Well, enlighten us then. What is the right way according to you? In case of my example: what is a better way than getting things done in a few hours, with no bugs whatsoever, with all functionality needed, and just working? I'm actually truly curious as to what would be better and more right.

Re: Visual Programming – Why It’s a Bad Idea

#110

Post by alliecat »

jki275 wrote: post #100
stinos wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't get why you call it a toy, or just for prototypes. Maybe think somewhat broader and not just about the bad experience(s) you had with it. For the things it's good at, it just works and it's pretty hard to find alternatives (well, Measurement Studio is ok, but for simple things it's usually still a bit more work than Labview). The hard part is figuring out what Labview is good at and not make the mistake…

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.

I say again; Don't be rude.

Especially don't be mean about other people's environments for the sake of being mean about their environments. Which is what you just did.

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