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Visual programming mostly makes sense when your model implies some sort of flow of information. For instance, there are a lot of visual programming languages fo
by overgard 11y ago
Visual programming mostly makes sense when your model implies some sort of flow of information. For instance, there are a lot of visual programming languages for materials/shaders in graphics visualization. In that context it totally makes sense, because it's about transforming a pixel buffer from one state to others via a lot of operations.
I think where it really breaks down is when you have loops. And loops within loops. Text is much more friendly for that.
- TuringTest 11y agoI've programmed professionally in a visual flow language which supported loops, and you're dead-on about nested loops being the hardest part. My understanding is that the problem is caused by it being hard to think about the actual values on which each component is working. I have this idea that this problem could be solved with a visual flow language where, at runtime, you could see the collection of all values that each node is emitting during program execution, rather than just the current value. I have not seen that approach in any flow language, so maybe I'll implement this idea in the future as an experiment.