So what are the applications for this? Writing video game mods in-game? Text is dense and we have ten fingers. It is pretty obvious why text won.
Unit is a general purpose visual programming system
31–40 of 84 posts
Re: Unit is a general purpose visual programming system
#32I have seen dozens of these things and have made a few myself. Beyond some specific use cases, they don't seem to scale cognitively. The tangle of connections is a problem. The previous HN link from @andsoltis has a better critique than me. Don't get me wrong. Besides being experientially cynical about these things, I'm also firmly in the camp of "one more UI breakthrough, bro and we might crack it!" This one has som…
> Beyond some specific use cases, they don't seem to scale cognitively. The tangle of connections is a problem.
This just isn't true. I've actually built things in visual languages. It just requires the same organization as text-based languages. One could write an entire text-based program in a single file in a single function, which would be a similar mess. In fact, the benefit or feature of visual languages is that they showcase poor code more readily than text-based code.
Re: Unit is a general purpose visual programming system
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many people have tried that. I built a language and UI around that way back, and many others have. I ditched mine because there were way too many unsolved problems I felt made it useless. The problem is that if your primary means of working with the code is visual, the textual representation of your code then tends to be foreign to you when you're trying to use it to communicate aspects of the code, and when you cons…
Why would you want to work with the text representation, except when debugging or in the backend? I mean I get why you'd want the text representation to exist--we have mountains of infrastructure around text-based representations of code. Git for version control and LLM code models would work out of the box, for example. But that can all be handled on the backend by transpiling the AST to text as needed. Why would th…
> Why would you want to work with the text representation, except when debugging or in the backend?
How would I communicate about the project to others in e-mails, instant messenger, face to face, in blog posts, in articles, in books?
How would I review diffs of code changes effectively?
That is why.
Find me a representation I can talk about and write about efficiently without screenshots or videos or requiring special software of every recipient on every platform, and you'll have advanced the state of the art in this field immensely.
> that have solved this exact problem
None of the ones you described have solved the problem of mapping between a visual and textual representation of the program seamlessly. Just attaching the comments from a textual version to an AST of the textual version is trivial. That's not the challenge.
> Use similar syntax to allow any statement to have comments attached, and use this instead of free-form /* / comments.
That doesn't get close to solving the issue. When I have a diagram showing the data flow of a piece of code, and I attach a comment to the edge* between the two nodes, in the textual representation where does that comment go? Does it go in the text version of the source node? In the destination node? What if I write a comment in the textual version right before a method call, and then switch to the visual version, does that stay in the source node? Does it become a label of the edge representing the method call? There are tons of edge cases there.
The problem isn't finding a way to attach the comments in the right place, but finding a way that roundtrips perfectly without adding noise in either representation.
Re: Unit is a general purpose visual programming system
#34The flow based visual programming has always being challenging field, and the problem remains: what are the values added comparing with the text based coding? I really want to love it, please give me a strong reason.
Debugging is quite nice. Clicking on a wire and being able to visually see its value at runtime and even present it in a custom UI, like a graph or chart, is awesome.
Re: Unit is a general purpose visual programming system
#35Pro tip: before launching on HN stick your site behind Cloudflare first so they can cache most of your traffic.
Or at the very least make an internet archive snapshot…
Re: Unit is a general purpose visual programming system
#36I have seen dozens of these things and have made a few myself. Beyond some specific use cases, they don't seem to scale cognitively. The tangle of connections is a problem. The previous HN link from @andsoltis has a better critique than me. Don't get me wrong. Besides being experientially cynical about these things, I'm also firmly in the camp of "one more UI breakthrough, bro and we might crack it!" This one has som…
I used LabVIEW extensively in the past. It was possible to organize code for readability, but it was physically laborious and I got massive eyestrain headaches and wrist fatigue from all of the fine mouse work needed. To be fair, maybe that's a personal ergonomic issue. I also can't use CAD for the same reason.
I can sling text with my eyes closed, and have managed the ergonomics of typing well enough that it hasn't injured me in almost 50 years.
On the other hand for applications where dataflow was a good paradigm for the problem being solved, I appreciated its benefits.
Re: Unit is a general purpose visual programming system
#37I have seen dozens of these things and have made a few myself. Beyond some specific use cases, they don't seem to scale cognitively. The tangle of connections is a problem. The previous HN link from @andsoltis has a better critique than me. Don't get me wrong. Besides being experientially cynical about these things, I'm also firmly in the camp of "one more UI breakthrough, bro and we might crack it!" This one has som…
> Beyond some specific use cases, they don't seem to scale cognitively. The tangle of connections is a problem. This just isn't true. I've actually built things in visual languages. It just requires the same organization as text-based languages. One could write an entire text-based program in a single file in a single function, which would be a similar mess. In fact, the benefit or feature of visual languages is that…
I have also actually built things in a visual programming language. They are simply not capable of the same level of organization as a text based language because pictures is a bad way to communicate. There is a reason humans advanced past cave painting and hieroglyphics.
Re: Unit is a general purpose visual programming system
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Beyond some specific use cases, they don't seem to scale cognitively. The tangle of connections is a problem. This just isn't true. I've actually built things in visual languages. It just requires the same organization as text-based languages. One could write an entire text-based program in a single file in a single function, which would be a similar mess. In fact, the benefit or feature of visual languages is that…
I have also actually built things in a visual programming language. They are simply not capable of the same level of organization as a text based language because pictures is a bad way to communicate. There is a reason humans advanced past cave painting and hieroglyphics.
Visual programming languages are not prevented from using textual symbols, though. And many people use diagrams to communicate ideas more efficiently than they could with text alone.
Re: Unit is a general purpose visual programming system
#39I think the future is in mixed modal computing environments. Text is superior in some architectural paradigms and inferior in others.
Box and noodles can be more descriptive and interactive for some parts of a system but probably not for all parts of a system. Configurations for parts of applications can be better in a GUI than a yaml file. Embedding one language like SQL in another could have an integrated GUI subeditor complete with language server.
Re: Unit is a general purpose visual programming system
#40DNS is not resolving for me. Is this an HN hug of death? Anyone have a link to GitHub or similar?