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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

#31
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…

VPLs are well known to be challenged by what Burnette et. al (the principle behind Forms/3) calls the scaling up problem. The problem is that language is great at metaphor, which is the basis of abstraction. For better or worse, language is based on words, and we have specialized hardware (in our brain) optimized for it. Until we evolve communication in an abstraction-dense format that isn't based on words, I don't t…

"communication in an abstraction-dense format that isn't based on words"

Animated GIFs, perhaps. :)

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

#32
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 a lot of people try to take a "one mental model fits all" approach to visual programming: and coding in general.

Sheet music, source code, mathematical equations, graphs, etc. are examples of tools we use make it easier to form mental models.

> It would take a while to learn to efficiently read and style visual code just like it does with text based code.

This is why domain specific VPLs work so well: because they allow people work within a mental model they are already familiar with.

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

#34

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 realize that it works fine on Safari - you just need to turn on WebGL.
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