5 ms·

Flowgorithm: Flowchart Programming IDE

70 points by vmorgulis 11y ago

jwatte 11y ago
Oh, no, not again! Anyway: how do I resolve merge conflicts in version control?
- kefka 11y ago
  With that Windows flowchart tool, no clue. But with Node-Red, I can use Flow-Cloner to close the main repo to my local machine. Then I can do work, and make sequential updates to my project in projects/project1/flows.json and use GIT as normal. Then I submit them as any source commit. Then the project owner can then clone the .json file into stable/main/dev as appropriate. And yes, that works, because it's what I do.
- striking 11y ago
  LVMerge and LVDiff showed how it's possible with LabVIEW.
ausjke 11y ago
never did this, what's the "selling point" of this method? Thanks.
- sparkie 11y ago
  The selling point is that you can present algorithms to non-programmers and they can actually follow them without knowing anything about programming. It seems the brain is better suited for understanding spatial visualizations than complex linguistic structures, which require more training to understand. Visualizations like flow charts can help even advanced programmers get an understanding of some unfamiliar code, because it's much easier to see the program flow spatially than to read a big block of code and produce that representation in your head (temporarily, only to forget it shortly after). The downside is that building visualizations is much slower than typing the set of instructions for it, as we do in code. This program seems to do things backwards (generate code from flowcharts), where what would be the most useful functionality would be to generate the flowcharts from code - thus enabling both the programmer to be productive and the non-programmer to not be scared.
- kpil 11y ago
  The selling point is that it looks good to non-professionals and people that should know better. There is a really small class of problems that it actually has some use. In reality, it makes easy problems easy, and everything else complicated or impossible. COBOL programmers had to use JSP since control flow in COBOL is ugly as hell, and because of a lack of good tools. I guess the same idea that spawned COBOL that drives this; Just about anyone that does not drool (that much) can actually build highly complicated systems. In COBOLs case, it turned out that it's really really hard to write good COBOL systems. Because it's really really hard to build systems in any language. I could go on about information theory and whatnot, but let's say that only a fool would do surgery with a butter knife.
- leke 11y ago
  I'm going to guess education.
- ausjke 11y ago
  I saw the MIT scratch(lego style) coding for kids, which is nice. Also in the early days we did draw flow diagrams like this IDE does before coding, and there is the PLC logic coding in the factories, and there are also nice programming tools for artists etc(e.g. processing), I am just honestly thinking where to fit this one. Will try it sometime.
explorigin 11y ago
Looks easier to use than [DRAKON](http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/ http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/) but does it launch rockets?
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Hear about that before, but now they seem to have introduced a web based editor. https://drakon-editor.com/ https://drakon-editor.com/ Seems to make it very easy to visualize parallel code btw.
kbody 11y ago
Make it: open-source, cross-platform, extensible and then it's a matter of finding a great integration way so it can be used for defining the business logic. Personally I am pretty confident that in the next few years there will be an emergence of such tool. Node-RED and NoFlo are on the area, but the goal of the first didn't help and the other went after the money and lost traction and the opportunity so it became stagnant.
jamesrom 11y ago
Why do people think programming is wiring up boxes with arrows? That's like 10% of it. This does look neat though and should be useful for education.
- oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
  Flowcharts are Turing-complete [0] so, theoretically, can represent any valid computer program. Programming is about a whole bunch of things but, as regards the actual coding bit, flowcharts can do 100%. [0] Admittedly, I haven't explored the original article enough to determine whether this one is, but that's not really my point.
- drewrv 11y ago
  > Why do people think programming is wiring up boxes with arrows? That's like 10% of it. I agree with this but would like to add: Why do people think programming is writing text into an editor? The suggestion that maybe there's a better way than writing stuff in emacs or vim is considered heresy.
  - alextgordon 11y ago
    You want to maximise the density of information that is visible on the screen. The limiting factor is human working memory: the more that is visible at any one time, the less I have to remember. So it makes sense to divide the screen into a matrix of little boxes, and put a symbol in each. That maximises information. Most programming languages fill those little boxes with ASCII glyphs because those are what's available on a US keyboard. We certainly could use Unicode or something else, but we'd need different input devices. How could we improve things? At the moment any space after a newline is wasted, unless there's a line comment. I like Chrome web inspector's approach of putting debug evals in there.
    - jljljl 11y ago
      Flowchart programming would let you zoom out and parse the program flow visually, something that's not always easy to do when reading a textual implementation. You're exchanging density at a detail level with being able to visualize the entire program from a 1000 feet high.
jrcii 11y ago
Didn't we, as a community, already try and subsequently scrap this idea when it was called UML?
- admax88q 11y ago
  The problem with UML is not that it's graphical, but because it's not the ultimate source of truth in your software. The UML isn't executable. Instead you build the UML and then go write code to implement what you modeled in UML. Anything you change in the code is not reflected in the UML making it out of date. If you could actually execute your UML it would be much more useful. As it stands, its just a standardized diagram for visualizing designs.
  - jrcii 11y ago
    There was this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UML_tool#Code_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UML_tool#Code_generation
    - noselasd 11y ago
      And it mostly generated scaffolding or property bags(java beans), not logic.
zitterbewegung 11y ago
When I was in an intro to programming class I used a similar tool. This is great for teaching people the absolute basics .
erikb 11y ago
I think I'm about 67% towards text and away from GUI as a person, but I think if one attempts to make something GUI based it should be beautiful.
saikrishnabala 11y ago
Also, I dont see any concepts of parallel programming or any object oriented programming features. It can only used by beginners to learn very basic features of a language.

70 points by vmorgulis 11y ago

jwatte 11y ago

Oh, no, not again! Anyway: how do I resolve merge conflicts in version control?

kefka 11y ago
With that Windows flowchart tool, no clue. But with Node-Red, I can use Flow-Cloner to close the main repo to my local machine. Then I can do work, and make sequential updates to my project in projects/project1/flows.json and use GIT as normal. Then I submit them as any source commit. Then the project owner can then clone the .json file into stable/main/dev as appropriate. And yes, that works, because it's what I do.
striking 11y ago
LVMerge and LVDiff showed how it's possible with LabVIEW.

ausjke 11y ago

never did this, what's the "selling point" of this method? Thanks.

sparkie 11y ago
The selling point is that you can present algorithms to non-programmers and they can actually follow them without knowing anything about programming. It seems the brain is better suited for understanding spatial visualizations than complex linguistic structures, which require more training to understand. Visualizations like flow charts can help even advanced programmers get an understanding of some unfamiliar code, because it's much easier to see the program flow spatially than to read a big block of code and produce that representation in your head (temporarily, only to forget it shortly after). The downside is that building visualizations is much slower than typing the set of instructions for it, as we do in code. This program seems to do things backwards (generate code from flowcharts), where what would be the most useful functionality would be to generate the flowcharts from code - thus enabling both the programmer to be productive and the non-programmer to not be scared.
kpil 11y ago
The selling point is that it looks good to non-professionals and people that should know better. There is a really small class of problems that it actually has some use. In reality, it makes easy problems easy, and everything else complicated or impossible. COBOL programmers had to use JSP since control flow in COBOL is ugly as hell, and because of a lack of good tools. I guess the same idea that spawned COBOL that drives this; Just about anyone that does not drool (that much) can actually build highly complicated systems. In COBOLs case, it turned out that it's really really hard to write good COBOL systems. Because it's really really hard to build systems in any language. I could go on about information theory and whatnot, but let's say that only a fool would do surgery with a butter knife.
leke 11y ago
I'm going to guess education.
ausjke 11y ago
I saw the MIT scratch(lego style) coding for kids, which is nice. Also in the early days we did draw flow diagrams like this IDE does before coding, and there is the PLC logic coding in the factories, and there are also nice programming tools for artists etc(e.g. processing), I am just honestly thinking where to fit this one. Will try it sometime.

explorigin 11y ago

Looks easier to use than [DRAKON](http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/ http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/) but does it launch rockets?

digi_owl 11y ago
Hear about that before, but now they seem to have introduced a web based editor. https://drakon-editor.com/ https://drakon-editor.com/ Seems to make it very easy to visualize parallel code btw.

kbody 11y ago

Make it: open-source, cross-platform, extensible and then it's a matter of finding a great integration way so it can be used for defining the business logic. Personally I am pretty confident that in the next few years there will be an emergence of such tool. Node-RED and NoFlo are on the area, but the goal of the first didn't help and the other went after the money and lost traction and the opportunity so it became stagnant.

jamesrom 11y ago

Why do people think programming is wiring up boxes with arrows? That's like 10% of it. This does look neat though and should be useful for education.

oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
Flowcharts are Turing-complete [0] so, theoretically, can represent any valid computer program. Programming is about a whole bunch of things but, as regards the actual coding bit, flowcharts can do 100%. [0] Admittedly, I haven't explored the original article enough to determine whether this one is, but that's not really my point.
drewrv 11y ago
> Why do people think programming is wiring up boxes with arrows? That's like 10% of it. I agree with this but would like to add: Why do people think programming is writing text into an editor? The suggestion that maybe there's a better way than writing stuff in emacs or vim is considered heresy.
- alextgordon 11y ago
  You want to maximise the density of information that is visible on the screen. The limiting factor is human working memory: the more that is visible at any one time, the less I have to remember. So it makes sense to divide the screen into a matrix of little boxes, and put a symbol in each. That maximises information. Most programming languages fill those little boxes with ASCII glyphs because those are what's available on a US keyboard. We certainly could use Unicode or something else, but we'd need different input devices. How could we improve things? At the moment any space after a newline is wasted, unless there's a line comment. I like Chrome web inspector's approach of putting debug evals in there.
  - jljljl 11y ago
    Flowchart programming would let you zoom out and parse the program flow visually, something that's not always easy to do when reading a textual implementation. You're exchanging density at a detail level with being able to visualize the entire program from a 1000 feet high.

jrcii 11y ago

Didn't we, as a community, already try and subsequently scrap this idea when it was called UML?

admax88q 11y ago
The problem with UML is not that it's graphical, but because it's not the ultimate source of truth in your software. The UML isn't executable. Instead you build the UML and then go write code to implement what you modeled in UML. Anything you change in the code is not reflected in the UML making it out of date. If you could actually execute your UML it would be much more useful. As it stands, its just a standardized diagram for visualizing designs.
- jrcii 11y ago
  There was this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UML_tool#Code_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UML_tool#Code_generation
  - noselasd 11y ago
    And it mostly generated scaffolding or property bags(java beans), not logic.

zitterbewegung 11y ago

When I was in an intro to programming class I used a similar tool. This is great for teaching people the absolute basics .

erikb 11y ago

I think I'm about 67% towards text and away from GUI as a person, but I think if one attempts to make something GUI based it should be beautiful.

saikrishnabala 11y ago

Also, I dont see any concepts of parallel programming or any object oriented programming features. It can only used by beginners to learn very basic features of a language.