The Once and Future Visual Programming Environment
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The Once and Future Visual Programming Environment
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Re: The Once and Future Visual Programming Environment
#2[deleted]
Re: The Once and Future Visual Programming Environment
#3I'd be interested to hear, from people who have experience with these older systems, why they didn't take off.
Maybe it's that they were developed almost pre-web? I was using the web in 1994 on windows 3.1 but certainly never heard of smalltalk. I think it must have been the Microsoft ecosystem and then later the Linux ecosystem that kept "better" tools in the shadows. In 1994 windows was a fantastic upgrade from DOS. You could not just have multiple windows, but multitask!
These days it seems like programming platforms like node.js can take off astonishingly quickly because of faster and faster dissemination on the web. It's not just more adoption, but more contribution too.
Re: The Once and Future Visual Programming Environment
#4This is interesting:
the closest anyone has ever gotten to creating a full dynamic environment for a C-language platform is Alexia Massalin’s Synthesis operating system. If you are a programmer of any kind, I’ll wager that Alexia’s dissertation will blow your mind
There have to be people on HN who know about this. Tell us more!
Wikipedia [1] says that the Synthesis kernel relied heavily on self-modifying code and that adoption of its techniques was inhibited by its being written in assembly language. That makes sense; it probably relied on the code=data aspect of assembly language, something that (Forth aside) you mostly don't get back until you've left the lower levels well behind.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_kernel#Massalin.27s_S...
Re: The Once and Future Visual Programming Environment
#5Smalltalk was too expensive. You have some other reasons here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/711140/why-isnt-smalltalk...
Re: The Once and Future Visual Programming Environment
#6There are plenty of Visual Programming paradigms in development today. The XCode Interface Builder, and Visual Studio's stuff as well, handle the tricky layout and placements before it is converted to text for the compiler. But the rest of the development is done through purely textual coding as the visual paradigm becomes exponentially more difficult to manage as the project "grows". So what happens is a hybrid.
Re: The Once and Future Visual Programming Environment
#7I'd be interested to hear, from people who have experience with these older systems, why they didn't take off. Maybe it's that they were developed almost pre-web? I was using the web in 1994 on windows 3.1 but certainly never heard of smalltalk. I think it must have been the Microsoft ecosystem and then later the Linux ecosystem that kept "better" tools in the shadows. In 1994 windows was a fantastic upgrade from DOS…
VisualAge for Java is another example of a Smalltalk-inspired visual programming evnrionment that never quite caught on. It had a lot of cool advanced IDE features, particularly for its time. It was also slow and kind of crashy, a complex program in its own.
Re: The Once and Future Visual Programming Environment
#8I'd be interested to hear, from people who have experience with these older systems, why they didn't take off. Maybe it's that they were developed almost pre-web? I was using the web in 1994 on windows 3.1 but certainly never heard of smalltalk. I think it must have been the Microsoft ecosystem and then later the Linux ecosystem that kept "better" tools in the shadows. In 1994 windows was a fantastic upgrade from DOS…
[deleted]
Re: The Once and Future Visual Programming Environment
#9This article has a host of interesting points and references which are great to read, but the one-upmanship of 'its probably been done before' (which seems omnipresent when discussing visual programming) really annoys me, because the upshot of it is to discourage anyone who is interested in this kind of work from pursuing it.
My point is that whilst lots of ideas have been tested before, what hasn't been 'done' is a a visual programming environment that really takes off. And when/if that happens, it will be worth more than 1000 well written research papers and PARC prototypes, and its creators will deserve more success than 1000 academics who have tested some idea (or merely seen someone else try) but never seen it through to widespread adoption....
Re: The Once and Future Visual Programming Environment
#10I'd be interested to hear, from people who have experience with these older systems, why they didn't take off. Maybe it's that they were developed almost pre-web? I was using the web in 1994 on windows 3.1 but certainly never heard of smalltalk. I think it must have been the Microsoft ecosystem and then later the Linux ecosystem that kept "better" tools in the shadows. In 1994 windows was a fantastic upgrade from DOS…
VisualAge for Java is another example of a Smalltalk-inspired visual programming evnrionment that never quite caught on. It had a lot of cool advanced IDE features, particularly for its time. It was also slow and kind of crashy, a complex program in its own.
VisualAge Smalltalk begot VisualAge Java which then became Eclipse, although over the transition some things changed a lot (more interop, no images). I think in turn IBM got VisualAge from their acquisition of OTI; Dave Thomas has the history, you could ask him if you ever attend OOPSLA .