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Except the programming is shit. My first job was building DCS software for coal power plants. We had such a graphical programming language. I can assure you, it

Except the programming is shit. My first job was building DCS software for coal power plants. We had such a graphical programming language. I can assure you, it was a pain in the butt to work with. Oh, you want to build many similar logic systems? Go ahead, do the SAME thing 200 times, click spamming is your job. The technology is used not because it's good, but because the industry is stuck in the 80's. I understand the appeal of having visual flow and feedback for your code but I see no reason why the building of code should be exclusively visual. I see great improvements that can be made by programatically generating control structures. But, well, the clients pay for it, the companies get wads of cash for sending engineers in the field so I guess it all works out in the end. As a side note, I suspects that if someone good puts his mind to it they could generate the code out of the layout of the plant and the different control mechanisms involved. With proper constraints, I suspects the system would be sufficiently defined without laying one stupid line (like, an actual line, from point A to point B) of code.

mtanski 11y ago
Never said it a great experience, just that they used visual programing to express logic flow. And I agree, the "language" forces you to repeat yourself. I believe that over the years there's been attempts at alternatives but none of them caught on. The only new things you see if faster hardware (PLC), new buses (took forever for ethernet to catch on) and new classes of IO / devices to control. The controls / industrial automation industry has different set of constraints & values. It's a very conservative industry. Double so if what you're programming is safety and error proofing. So the industry values tools that consistent, maintainable (by current / future staff). There's many cases where you might be supporting an installation with a mixture of both new and 20 year old hardware. It is just a different world.
snowwindwaves 11y ago
Both of the major platforms Allen Bradley RSLogix 5000 and Schneider Electric Unity allow the programmer to create objects of user defined data types and functions that can operate on elementary (eg float, INT) or user defined data types. They also support arrays, and arrays of objects. They also both support structured text so you can type if statements and for loops and call functions. So for at least those PLC platforms it is not exclusively visual and you can write a function once and use it many times.

mtanski 11y ago

Never said it a great experience, just that they used visual programing to express logic flow. And I agree, the "language" forces you to repeat yourself. I believe that over the years there's been attempts at alternatives but none of them caught on. The only new things you see if faster hardware (PLC), new buses (took forever for ethernet to catch on) and new classes of IO / devices to control. The controls / industrial automation industry has different set of constraints & values. It's a very conservative industry. Double so if what you're programming is safety and error proofing. So the industry values tools that consistent, maintainable (by current / future staff). There's many cases where you might be supporting an installation with a mixture of both new and 20 year old hardware. It is just a different world.

snowwindwaves 11y ago

Both of the major platforms Allen Bradley RSLogix 5000 and Schneider Electric Unity allow the programmer to create objects of user defined data types and functions that can operate on elementary (eg float, INT) or user defined data types. They also support arrays, and arrays of objects. They also both support structured text so you can type if statements and for loops and call functions. So for at least those PLC platforms it is not exclusively visual and you can write a function once and use it many times.