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Where should visual programming go?
51–60 of 77 posts
Re: Where should visual programming go?
#52When this last round of discussion of visual programming happened I had a minor epiphany. For a little background, I’ve maintained that visual programming goes absolutely nowhere until we have visual diffs that work (work as in workflow). I’ve been saying that since before the UML Trough of Disillusionment kicked into high gear. Without diffs, without analysis, we are going nowhere fast. Almost every other link of th…
The challenge with visual programming from my perspective is how to get the abstraction level just right. It's like Terraform/HCL modules: too granular, you wind up passing in a billion parameters, and the module adds little value. Too high-level, too many assumptions, also adds little value. I have an idea that I think would be suitable for visual programming. Every time I think about it, I come to the conclusion th…
>The challenge with visual programming from my perspective is how to get the abstraction level just right.
It is a big problem if you are trying to develop a genric visual programming language. But much less of a problem if you restrict the problem domain to something like data processing, signal processing or image processing.
Re: Where should visual programming go?
#53Non-programmer here. I’ve long desired to program Arduino microcontrollers but haven’t had the ability and/or the patience to learn programming. I’m a very visual person and get confused if I have to keep more than a few lines of code in my head. Even if I understand how I want a signal to be processed into an action, when the flow chart in my head needs to be translated into text I get overwhelmed. A solution arrive…
> I’m a very visual person and get confused if I have to keep more than a few lines of code in my head. Even if I understand how I want a signal to be processed into an action, when the flow chart in my head needs to be translated into text I get overwhelmed.
It looks like you've got things sorted. But another option would be to write your flowchart down on paper ... get your idea out of your head in a visual medium, and then turn that into code without needing to hold the whole thing in your head at once.
Re: Where should visual programming go?
#54not a well thought out take, but i think visual programming should stop trying to encode application logic and focus on: - building good UIs rapidly (e.g. improving & simplifying layout options, look & feel, etc.) - make debugging trivial & powerful - make deployment trivial Visual Basic was on the right track in almost every way except as a language. Hypercard maybe had the language thing figured out: use english as…
> Hypercard maybe had the language thing figured out: use english as a base?
I wrote some stuff in applescript, which is similar / descended from HyperTalk. I would say it's the worst language I've used; it's so hard to use because of pretending to be natural. It doesn't help when Apple forgot how to write documentation somewhere around 2008, so there's no authoritative docs, and it's unsearchable because it looks like english words.
Literally anything else would be preferable, but applescript is the best way to automate MacOS. Thankfully, I only had to use it once.
Re: Where should visual programming go?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was referring to the fact that in Lisp everything is an expression, so technically Lisp doesn't stop you from writing something like this, whereas in Python you'd have to define distinct variables and nest them afterwards: ((if ( Now imagine if this were a bunch of deeply nested expressions...
I guess I just don't see the problem that you are seeing for expression-based languages + visual programming. Are you saying that it would be cluttered if there were too many things without names?
I'm saying that expression-based languages encourage a style of programming which would resemble deep hierarchies in a visual language. They don't enforce abstractions via statements and whatnot.
Re: Where should visual programming go?
#56Recent and related: We need visual programming. No, not like that - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40937119 - July 2024 (494 comments)
In that thread, I mentioned the work on systems analysis and visualization done by the people behind Moose. (a framework for Pharo Smalltalk).
I didn’t follow that project for a while. It seems that their latest work is called Glamorous Toolkit, and the presentation is worth watching and relevant to this thread:
Re: Where should visual programming go?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was referring to the fact that in Lisp everything is an expression, so technically Lisp doesn't stop you from writing something like this, whereas in Python you'd have to define distinct variables and nest them afterwards: ((if ( Now imagine if this were a bunch of deeply nested expressions...
Technically this works in Scheme, but not in Lisp. In Common Lisp one would need to write (funcall (if (
You're right, the example I wrote was in Racket. I didn't know "everything is an expression" wouldn't work in CL.
Re: Where should visual programming go?
#58I've been experimenting with a project I'm calling guish , a bidirectional command line editor for writing bash pipelines with GUI modules. The best way to explain it is that text written in the CLI prompt updates the GUI and changes to the GUI updates the CLI prompt in turn. It operates by working on the bash AST and has step-by-step outputs so you can see the result of each step in the pipeline's output. Plenty of…
Looks wonderful. I think being able to type examples from a textbook or a tutorial into this and see each stage visually would make people learn a lot faster.
Re: Where should visual programming go?
#59Wow, that mouse pointer effect is obnoxious.
I think it's showing actual live pointers on the site which is kind of cool but yes it is not... necessarily pleasant.
Re: Where should visual programming go?
#60For anyone interested in working on visual programming professionally, we use it for creation in Rec Room in a system I built called Circuits https://blog.recroom.com/posts/2021/5/03/the-circuits-handbo...
It has a real place among novice programmers. We even have some experts who use it as a fun alternative to writing text. I don't see visual systems as an effective way to replace everything us experts are doing but they've gotten a ton of mileage in the jr. and learning domain. Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/) being another obvious example.
See the email in my profile if you are interested in roles and I'll see if we can find something that fits.