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Flood: Geometric visual programming, driven by a Scheme interpreter

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Re: Flood: Geometric visual programming, driven by a Scheme interpreter

#11

Post by seanmcdirmid »

pjackson5 wrote: post #8
trothoun wrote: post #5

Demos like this are cool, but they make me think that we'll never see a non-toy visual programming tool. Even a fairly simple bit of logic quickly becomes an incomprehensible soup of interconnections. edit: Thinking about it a bit more, whats lacking in all the examples of visual programming I've seen is a clean way to build abstractions. It would take a while to learn to efficently read and style visual code just li…

Hold on a sec, I stare at graphs like this all day! If you work in visual effects your whole world is nodes and connections - and that is not a complicated graph ;) For someone whos not used to programming a big wall of text is going to look messy and incomprehensible too. Just like there are best practices with code there are best practices with how you organise this kind of graph. you can usually save a subnetwork…

Can you communicate in graphs? Can they be used to express metaphors or abstractions? You've just written a wall of text in your post that someone who doesn't understand English will find messy and incomprehensible.

Visual formats are great at some things, especially in expressing concrete concepts that are perceptible. They are just not great at abstraction, which forms the basis for most of our non-trivial programming tasks.

Functional programming is quite interesting because it is not based on our linguistic capabilities, but rather a very different form of mathematical abstraction. Incidentally, many people find OO easier to grock because it leverages our intrinsic language skills.

Re: Flood: Geometric visual programming, driven by a Scheme interpreter

#12

Post by peetle »

TheZenPsycho wrote: post #7

am I missing something? using safari. All I see is a blank white screen, with a few things that might be "buttons", none of which do anything. It doesn't respond to keypresses. No messages appear saying that my browser might not be compatible. what am I expected to do here?

I apologize - the site is only tested on Chrome. At this point it's mostly an experiment, so I haven't put in the time to ensure a consistent experience across browsers.

Re: Flood: Geometric visual programming, driven by a Scheme interpreter

#13

Post by dchichkov »

Haha, I remember once, after a few weeks of hacking linux kernel / mellanox infiniband stack I've had a dream in which I've spend quite some time in the linux-themed 3d construct similar to this one ;) Shiny ;)

On a serious note, there are some domain-specific programming tools in which visual approach works well. For example functional protocol testers (with SDL) or data acquisition (LabView and such).

Re: Flood: Geometric visual programming, driven by a Scheme interpreter

#14

Post by pjackson5 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #11
pjackson5 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hold on a sec, I stare at graphs like this all day! If you work in visual effects your whole world is nodes and connections - and that is not a complicated graph ;) For someone whos not used to programming a big wall of text is going to look messy and incomprehensible too. Just like there are best practices with code there are best practices with how you organise this kind of graph. you can usually save a subnetwork…

Can you communicate in graphs? Can they be used to express metaphors or abstractions? You've just written a wall of text in your post that someone who doesn't understand English will find messy and incomprehensible. Visual formats are great at some things, especially in expressing concrete concepts that are perceptible. They are just not great at abstraction, which forms the basis for most of our non-trivial programm…

I might be out of my depth and not truly understand what is meant by abstractions, but I think the answer is yes?

Lets look at the example on the website, theres a node called cube. Isnt that little node an abstraction of a whole lot of other things? A more advanced visual programming language would allow you to access and modify what a "cube" is. You would be able to double click on that and be taken to another graph. This graph would be about the construction of a cube and would take input of width and create triangles in space to represent a cube. you could double click on the triangle node and be taken deeper, this time a node that takes vectors and defines where the surface is between them and sends it to the renderer. We could have a seperate graph to define what a vector is and the data structures behind it.

All of this for a simple cube could be represented as a huge tangle of nodes and connections, but we can condense it down to a single node called cube that takes an input of width. Having networks and sub-networks allows you to choose what level of abstraction you work at. Each of these things at different levels can be represented by a graph.

Re: Flood: Geometric visual programming, driven by a Scheme interpreter

#16

Post by peetle »

trothoun wrote: post #5

Demos like this are cool, but they make me think that we'll never see a non-toy visual programming tool. Even a fairly simple bit of logic quickly becomes an incomprehensible soup of interconnections. edit: Thinking about it a bit more, whats lacking in all the examples of visual programming I've seen is a clean way to build abstractions. It would take a while to learn to efficently read and style visual code just li…

You should definitely check out the work going on in Dynamo right now: https://github.com/DynamoDS/Dynamo We've put a huge amount of work into this problem.

Dynamo has the notion of a "custom node." This is essentially a lambda. It is represented by a "nested" set of nodes, making up the function body.

There's a bunch more stuff going on there - including compiling nodes to a domain specific, associative language called DesignScript.

Re: Flood: Geometric visual programming, driven by a Scheme interpreter

#17

Post by peetle »

pjackson5 wrote: post #14
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you communicate in graphs? Can they be used to express metaphors or abstractions? You've just written a wall of text in your post that someone who doesn't understand English will find messy and incomprehensible. Visual formats are great at some things, especially in expressing concrete concepts that are perceptible. They are just not great at abstraction, which forms the basis for most of our non-trivial programm…

I might be out of my depth and not truly understand what is meant by abstractions, but I think the answer is yes? Lets look at the example on the website, theres a node called cube. Isnt that little node an abstraction of a whole lot of other things? A more advanced visual programming language would allow you to access and modify what a "cube" is. You would be able to double click on that and be taken to another grap…

Exactly. The node is just a lambda - no reason it can't be expressed in exactly the same way.

Re: Flood: Geometric visual programming, driven by a Scheme interpreter

#18

Post by columbo »

trothoun wrote: post #5

Demos like this are cool, but they make me think that we'll never see a non-toy visual programming tool. Even a fairly simple bit of logic quickly becomes an incomprehensible soup of interconnections. edit: Thinking about it a bit more, whats lacking in all the examples of visual programming I've seen is a clean way to build abstractions. It would take a while to learn to efficently read and style visual code just li…

I think to really get visual coding to work it would need to start from circuit design; Vin, Vout, ICs, logic gates etc.

That doesn't really get you towards end-users writing code but I'd find it pretty useful when trying to look at a complicated process.

Re: Flood: Geometric visual programming, driven by a Scheme interpreter

#19

Post by couchand »

dchichkov wrote: post #13

Haha, I remember once, after a few weeks of hacking linux kernel / mellanox infiniband stack I've had a dream in which I've spend quite some time in the linux-themed 3d construct similar to this one ;) Shiny ;) On a serious note, there are some domain-specific programming tools in which visual approach works well. For example functional protocol testers (with SDL) or data acquisition (LabView and such).

To those examples I'd add integration middleware like Dell Boomi.

Re: Flood: Geometric visual programming, driven by a Scheme interpreter

#20

Post by couchand »

peetle wrote: post #12
TheZenPsycho wrote: post #7

am I missing something? using safari. All I see is a blank white screen, with a few things that might be "buttons", none of which do anything. It doesn't respond to keypresses. No messages appear saying that my browser might not be compatible. what am I expected to do here?

I apologize - the site is only tested on Chrome. At this point it's mostly an experiment, so I haven't put in the time to ensure a consistent experience across browsers.

only tested in Chrome seems to be the new hotness these days...
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