3 ms·

I once had to do a project in LabView, where you either can go down the visual path or the C/C++ path. So you had to draw a switch statement or a while loop and

• TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  Max/MSP is increasingly popular in music: https://cycling74.com/products/max/ https://cycling74.com/products/max/ It looks like something people coming from a modular synthesizer background should be able to get. In fact it makes a lot of simple tasks hard because something trivial like a loop takes an unexpectedly distracting amount of pointing, clicking, typing, dragging, and joining. The DSP and openGL parts aren't too bad, but hacking together non-trivial event and data processing logic can be torturous. This is the big problem with dataflow - it makes you keep switching mental modes from visual object recognition to spatial understanding to text parsing/editing to causal modelling to UI design. Text has its own issues, but it lets you stay in one mode. I think VB and Delphi had a lot of success because they hit a sweet spot between the two. They let you solve visual and UI problems visually, and logic problems with code. Webspace still doesn't have an exact equivalent. Flash came close, but the animation stage added an extra layer of complication. Most web design tools don't do a good job of simplifying and abstracting the relationship between onscreen elements and code the way VB and Delphi did.
  • brenschluss 11y ago
    > In fact it makes a lot of simple tasks hard because something trivial like a loop takes an unexpectedly distracting amount of pointing, clicking, typing, dragging, and joining. That's because you don't create loops or if-statements in graphical programming languages, in the same way that you don't create loops or conditionals in functional programming; you use map, filter, etc.