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Ok, so you seem to understand it's a huge problem to attack and many, many people tried to do it and viewed it as "the next big thing" in programming (Wikipedia

by twa927 10y ago

Ok, so you seem to understand it's a huge problem to attack and many, many people tried to do it and viewed it as "the next big thing" in programming (Wikipedia page [0] lists more than 100 visual languages). I think a possible way to a success is creating a domain-specific language tailored for enterprise users. I think it would be extremely hard to win "real" programmers with a visual language. There's a huge cultural clash of the traditional programming centered around text (editors, VCS, build systems, Unix integration etc.) and visual GUI tools that are just from a different world. So a tool for visually building a mobile app by a non-programmer from some pre-built "blocks" - yes. A general-purpose programming language - not a chance. Why being forced to use your GUI tool, when the same structure can be represented in text and thus supported by the multitude tools that are known for decades? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language

murukesh_s 10y ago
I know it's like attacking a huge army :). But if we succeed, it would be a huge win, for all of us, right?. I believe pure text-based programming is an overkill in modern programming. We seldom write complicated algorithms, we mostly do plumbing of pre-written algorithms. Why should we be stuck with directly editing text for everything, even down to requiring library to tiniest details? Internally even flows are also text, but you never need to edit it directly. If you really need to write complicated algorithms, text editor is always available, like say the terminal in mac or command prompt in windows world. It will also work well with modern input interfaces like touch based screens and even gesture based AR/VR systems. And as a far stretched goal, wouldn't it be easy for AI bots to assist you with a structured program vs plain text(as there could be a thousand way you could format text)?. Imagine you will be telling the computer what to do instead of typing out every detail.. We have put a lot of effort into it and we believe we are one of the best implementation till now. And we will be making it open source, so we can make it happen together as a community.

by twa927 10y ago

murukesh_s 10y ago

I know it's like attacking a huge army :). But if we succeed, it would be a huge win, for all of us, right?. I believe pure text-based programming is an overkill in modern programming. We seldom write complicated algorithms, we mostly do plumbing of pre-written algorithms. Why should we be stuck with directly editing text for everything, even down to requiring library to tiniest details? Internally even flows are also text, but you never need to edit it directly. If you really need to write complicated algorithms, text editor is always available, like say the terminal in mac or command prompt in windows world. It will also work well with modern input interfaces like touch based screens and even gesture based AR/VR systems. And as a far stretched goal, wouldn't it be easy for AI bots to assist you with a structured program vs plain text(as there could be a thousand way you could format text)?. Imagine you will be telling the computer what to do instead of typing out every detail.. We have put a lot of effort into it and we believe we are one of the best implementation till now. And we will be making it open source, so we can make it happen together as a community.