A personal history of visual programming environments (2021)

I enjoyed reading this. I knew of quartz composer but I never did anything with it.

I love visual tools and I think they are underutilized today. I cut my teeth in ~2005 with Houdini[0] and Fusion[1] which are both heavily graph / node based (and procedural).

Most recently I have been rekindling my love for visual programming and flow based programming and plan to spend some time in January and February doing more research around flow based programming for infrastructure management.

I plan to get this sort of info published on my website which I have neglected for half a decade or more but if you are interested in visual programming you might enjoy checking these out:

Unit from Samuel Timbó:

https://github.com/samuelmtimbo/unit

https://ioun.it/

A video of me exploring what I figured out about it (while also learning to stream) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwknTfGVDq8

Behave-Graph from Ben Houston:

https://github.com/bhouston/behave-graph

And the products I learned so long ago

[0] Houdini https://www.sidefx.com/products/houdini/

[1] Fusion https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/fusion

Quartz Composer was IMHO one of the coolest things to come out of Apple ~15 years ago in the early days of their Core Animation layer-based rendering framework. When I was first freelancing, I got a gig working on some displays for a large law firm and chose QC. Was able to do things like fancily display customer testimonials and the like, but have a Mac mini running things which had a shared folder that staff could just drop scans of letters in. It was the best of both worlds — amazing programmatic 3D rendering and Mac ease of use for the non-technical people.

I also used it briefly for some small about box effects in my apps, which allowed me to programmatically insert text or imagery based on the user’s registration or other variable data and just plug it into the inlets in the QC animation that was used.

It was basically a totally programmer-exposed motion graphics package. Too good.

I also came at some of this stuff from an early background in electronic music and modular synthesis (which is all about making the connections between functional blocks visual/visceral).

I've used Max/MSP and Grasshopper. I find them really great for building up interactive tools which have a bunch of inputs/controls.

The one down side of these tools is that they can turn into visual spaghetti code which is hard to trace.

I strongly recommend the last two links in the article for their visual catalogs of visual programming environments.

Visual programming is still very much used today if we count Unreal Engine blueprints, Blender shader nodes, Unity shader graph, etc.

Visual spaghetti gets real bad real quick, but I find the process of despaghettification to be incredibly gratifying. Well routed graphs make my brain produce happy chemicals.