I work daily in TouchDesigner and am constantly wrestling with the integration of its node and Python scripting contexts. In particular order of operations, delegation of responsibility, and store of state are very unsolved areas when expressing intent across both domains.
Mixing Visual and Textual Code
41–47 of 47 posts
Re: Mixing Visual and Textual Code
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The simple text editor has a lot to answer for when it comes to how we think about programming I wonder whether those that used punch cards said the same about those punch cards? It’s weird how our mobile devices aren’t programmed using keyboards/text as input devices. Or our microwaves. Or refrigerators. Programmers are stuck with text because their programming paradigms are stuck in a text-based paradigm, hence A…
> I wonder whether those that used punch cards said the same about those punch cards? Oh, absolutely. One statement/line per card, the first 5 columns reserved for labels (how's that for significant whitespace?), the 6th to signal line continuation, the last eight for arbitrary comments/line numbers? People loathed it.
Punch cards are just text editors in primitive form though, ie columns across and lines down. All very 2D.
A visual programming canvas is free of that, and thus can display connections and relationships far more deeply and conveniently than text-based languages.
It's the 2D nature of our languages that has a lot to answer for.
Re: Mixing Visual and Textual Code
#43We have the complete AST in almost every IDE. Why are we not learning to render abstracted code and systems from that??
because it's unusable in practice. It's fun as an idea and as a toy, but when you try to use such a visual system to do work, you quickly realise that text is way more flexible and simpler to operate on.
Re: Mixing Visual and Textual Code
#44Related research: Elliot Evans' Polytope (https://elliot.website/editor/).
Re: Mixing Visual and Textual Code
#45I feel it would be remiss of me not to mention the humble TempleOS support for mixing code and sprites. I can't say I've ever used the system myself, but its DolDoc format [0] offered some pretty nifty features for directly interspersing sprites into source code viewable together as one. You can see some screenshots on the hackmag page [1] under the section that reads: "If that’s not enough to impress you, open any game file and behold the unthinkable: the sprites are embedded right in the code!"
0) https://tinkeros.github.io/WbTempleOS/Doc/DolDocOverview.htm... 1) https://hackmag.com/security/templeos
Re: Mixing Visual and Textual Code
#46[flagged]
Re: Mixing Visual and Textual Code
#47[flagged]