Full Metal Jacket: A visual dataflow language (2016)

I'm just a few pages in to the tutorial and I already want to try it out myself... but how? Where's the link?

Is this not available to the public yet?

My first thought was “it’s Visual Lisp”. My second was that it reminded me of an old music tracker program called Buzz Tracker. It was a bitch to learn, but once you got a few concepts down, it was insanely powerful.

It was also pretty unstable.

I have seen visual dataflow languages and even worked on some of them. They usually work better in specific domains like stream processing, control systems, signal processing and such. Even then, once a "program" gets complex it can get tangled fast. A node with 3000 edges starts to look messy. There are some things you can do to fix it but then you just kind of wish to use a simple script.

As for general computing, the most thought out language I've seen so far is probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON. Apparently you can now even try it online: https://drakonhub.com/try-me?example=mind157

I like Full Metal Jacket in that it starts with a functional approach (it seems to be based on LISP) and might actually be a good way to introduce functional programming to newcomers. For example, here you just have a "factorial" node when you define the factorial function: http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/fmj/tutorials/Recursion.html Some people really struggle with recursion initially and if they are visual learners this might be helpful.

Excel is an interesting case.

I think it sits between both worlds. The interface and main interaction is visual, yet the actual logic is textual.

This seems to hit the sweet spot, making it useful for the non-programmer yet providing significant depth and complexity.

Note that personally I hate using plain Excel because the formulas seem so restrictive and the functions I want are never there, but again this seems to be ideal for the target audience.

The name of this language is stupid. It evokes violence, either via the bullet reference, or via the film of the same name. I'm not thin-skinned or even prone to political correctness, but I still find it slightly insensitive for no compelling reason.

Then I read the author's explanation (http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/fmj/Name.html), which makes a comparison between lisp (the programming language) and stereotypes about homosexuality (with the requisite "I have gay friends!" disclaimer).

Maybe the author should grow up.