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Can't communicate visually. The translation between written and spoken words, even made up technical words, is fast, accurate, unambiguous. Visual means slow,

by VLM 11y ago

Can't communicate visually. The translation between written and spoken words, even made up technical words, is fast, accurate, unambiguous. Visual means slow, inaccurate, ambiguous, which is sometimes cool for art, but not for communication. It would be like trying to program musically, or by touch, or by (oh no) smell. There is also the productivity danger of futzing, or whatever the modern term is. In the early desktop publishing era, we were promised that instead of taking ten minutes writing a memo, we'd type one in five minutes, but reality was we'd spend an hour using a minimum of seven fonts and three text colors and pictures. So much for productivity improvement! Likewise a visual programming language would invite people with authority but no ability to endlessly rearrange "put that box over there, looks nicer" "Make that text red" "that needs a larger font".

yiyus 11y ago
Except we can perfectly communicate visually, and we do it all the time. It is common to draw diagrams when you are trying to understand or explain a problem. If you want to give somebody a rough idea of how your program works, it is infinitely more likely that you use some kind of drawing than music, touch or smell. I don't agree neither with visual programming inviting people to lose time in details. The same you do not lose time thinking about how to structure a sentence to write a program, you would not lose it changing colors and fonts in a visual programming environment with an enforced "syntax". I do not like visual programming (I have had very bad experiences with LabView), but I think it may be as good (or as bad) as text if the field had evolved differently.
- justinclift 11y ago
  "Except we can perfectly communicate visually, and we do it all the time." Hmmm, someone should create a visual programming language using Dilbert characters & iconography. :)
- wvenable 11y ago
  Visual communication without language is always much simpler and more abstract than other forms of visual communication. Without invoking a language with syntax, you simply cannot get enough information density to make it useful. The only time we generally communicate visually is when we want to express something with less detail (e.g. charts, diagrams, graphs, emoji, etc).

by VLM 11y ago

yiyus 11y ago

Except we can perfectly communicate visually, and we do it all the time. It is common to draw diagrams when you are trying to understand or explain a problem. If you want to give somebody a rough idea of how your program works, it is infinitely more likely that you use some kind of drawing than music, touch or smell. I don't agree neither with visual programming inviting people to lose time in details. The same you do not lose time thinking about how to structure a sentence to write a program, you would not lose it changing colors and fonts in a visual programming environment with an enforced "syntax". I do not like visual programming (I have had very bad experiences with LabView), but I think it may be as good (or as bad) as text if the field had evolved differently.

justinclift 11y ago
"Except we can perfectly communicate visually, and we do it all the time." Hmmm, someone should create a visual programming language using Dilbert characters & iconography. :)
wvenable 11y ago
Visual communication without language is always much simpler and more abstract than other forms of visual communication. Without invoking a language with syntax, you simply cannot get enough information density to make it useful. The only time we generally communicate visually is when we want to express something with less detail (e.g. charts, diagrams, graphs, emoji, etc).