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Where should visual programming go?

tonsky.me

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Re: Where should visual programming go?

#3

Post by hinkley »

When 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 the lifecycle is still intact with visual code but focusing on an editor without diffs breaks the chain. There’s no producing and maintaining commercial grade software without it. It’s either toy programs, or absolutely heroic effort, and what else could you have done with that much energy?

The epiphany was this: motion detection has been a feature of digital video since at least the MPEG days. Someone with a background in video compression needs to tackle the problem of doffing visual code. Figuring out how the code should look (mechanical sympathy) to facilitate this.

Re: Where should visual programming go?

#4

Post by jarsin »

hinkley wrote: post #3

When 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…

Unreal has visual diff. It's interactive so you can click on some node and it will take you to the diff in the other file.

I honestly never use it because I only use unreal alone, so can't say how good or bad it is in real world project.

Re: Where should visual programming go?

#6

Post by terr-dav »

hinkley wrote: post #3

When 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…

Another place where visual diffs would be indispensable is file-system organization. Each node in a file tree contains another graphable data structure: permissions! Especially on network shares where user groups are more common.

As long as there's some structured record of changes made to permissions and structure, those can be visualized.

Re: Where should visual programming go?

#8

Post by TYPE_FASTER »

hinkley wrote: post #3

When 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 that first you need a DSL, or at least a JSON Schema or something.

If you have a DSL/schema, then you also have a way to diff.

Then, you implement your visual programming environment, and visual diffs turn into effectively communicating those differences visually. Faded color to indicate a deleted node and connector, bold parameter and value to indicate a change, etc.

Re: Where should visual programming go?

#9

Post by williamcotton »

I'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 screenshots, a demo video, and more at https://github.com/williamcotton/guish

I'd love feedback, positive or negative!

Re: Where should visual programming go?

#10

Post by hinkley »

jarsin wrote: post #4
hinkley wrote: post #3

When 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…

Unreal has visual diff. It's interactive so you can click on some node and it will take you to the diff in the other file. I honestly never use it because I only use unreal alone, so can't say how good or bad it is in real world project.

You know of a good demo video?
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