6 ms·

Drakon: a visual language for specifications from the Russian space program

278 points by GuiA 10y ago

snerbles 10y ago
Visual languages are also often used in industrial applications, usually in the form of ladder logic instead of flow diagrams.
smaili 10y ago
This is the first time in a while I've seen an active project on SourceForge.
- hyperion2010 10y ago
  https://github.com/stepan-mitkin/drakon_editor https://github.com/stepan-mitkin/drakon_editor seems to be where development is though.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Nice, isn't it? (SF has new owners!)
ivan_ah 10y ago
This is very cool. I like this example which uses diagram for general logic flow, but mixes raw code for details: http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/folder-night.png http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/folder-night.png
hbt 10y ago
This is great work. FYI spacex uses LabView http://www.ni.com/labview/ http://www.ni.com/labview/ (amongst other stuff) I wonder if you could use annotations to manage the visuals e.g http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/folder-night.png http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/folder-night.png You'd have an inline annotation to separate the code blocks and generate the visuals so you don't have to maintain/update two places. Any tool that does that? Also, integrating different level of complexity using system 1,2,3 (from https://www.amazon.ca/Software-Requirements-3rd-Karl-Wiegers/dp/0735679665 https://www.amazon.ca/Software-Requirements-3rd-Karl-Wiegers...) to represent user flow diagram in addition to flow charts. Flow charts get confusing after some complexity. Useless if you want to represent multiple actors + messages. Systems/sub-systems view. There is a tendency to think of visual programming as an all or nothing. Either we have all text or all visual. As long as it is "Write once, update everywhere", visual tools can be useful in navigating new code bases, obtaining insights and quickly understanding a piece of code. The problem though is they often require maitenance and get out of date with reality (even if it is comments/annotations)
asciihacker 10y ago
I fought like hell to install all the deps before throwing in the towel.
- Alupis 10y ago
  > I fought like hell to install all the deps before throwing in the towel. What? The deps are pretty tame for such a large program. tcl8.6, tk8.6, tcllib, libsqlite3-tcl, libtk-img So, for a debian/ubuntu machine: sudo apt-get install tcl8.6 tk8.6 tcllib libsqlite3-tcl libtk-img RHEL/Fedora and friends will be similar, except with yum/dnf. All of this info is at the top of the downloads section: http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/editor.html#downloads http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/editor.html#downloads
asciihacker 10y ago
Also see PlantUML, which also has experimental code generation tech.
aaronheid 10y ago
Looks awesome, great tool to reduce complexity in all situations
ilaksh 10y ago
Is there some overlap between these types of tools and http://martinfowler.com/bliki/ProjectionalEditing.html http://martinfowler.com/bliki/ProjectionalEditing.html
- eiffel31 10y ago
  Drakon does not seem to be model-based, so I would say no. If you are interested in Projectional Editing, you should look at MPS or Eclipse's Sirius.
- iamcreasy 10y ago
  Can you explain in simpler terms what "Projectional Editing" is?
javajosh 10y ago
Pretty cool, but one nitpick: when you save as SVG it embeds the font as a base64 encoded url(). Neat trick, but it bloats the file a lot. A simple chart with a few elements ends up being 250kB. Hand-written SVG would be two orders-of-magnitude less than that.
kelvin0 10y ago
Humm, this looks and awful like flow charts? What am I missing (apart from the 'Insertion' of macro charts)? All the rules about not 'breaking' visual cohesiveness seem like a plus, although not groundbreaking either. Don't want to sound negative, maybe someone can correct me?
- GuiA 10y ago
  It is a formal specification for a specific kind of flow charts, yes. The specifics of the implementation, the history, and the tooling around it are what's interesting. Your comment is a bit analogous to someone commenting "Humm, this looks an awful lot like programming?" on a link documenting a forgotten programming language. Well yes, it's true, but it's a tautological statement.
  - kelvin0 10y ago
    Ah, so this is interesting from a historic perspective. I thought this was being released as a formal method that brought some innovation, as mentionned earlier I had no idea or context other than the slide I went through posted in the link.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
aaawow 10y ago
The whole Buran spacecraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft) was designed using Drakon
hulahoof 10y ago
Can anyone explain the advantage of a specification like this over something like UML?
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  Compared to UML Activity Diagrams, DRAKON-Foo (where Foo can be Python, C, C++, Erlang, or any of a bunch of others): (1) Is constrained in a way designed to enhance understanding of the visual flow, and (2) Directly includes code (in language Foo) in the boxes, rather than text; that is, its a programming environment, not a diagramming language with text that gets converted to program code somewhere else that is maintained separately. The first item is also a feature of DRAKON by itself.
  - eiffel31 10y ago
    About (2): there is a standard action language for UML which can be used to fully describe your algorithm, independently of any language. In that sense, the DRAKON approach seems more practical for software engineers / programmers while the UML approach seems better for the domain experts.
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
I'm really confused as to what exactly this is, but it looks cool. It seems to be some kind of visual programming environment, which I'm usually against on principle (BOO non-standard binary formats! ASCII text is the closest we can get to future-proof, and thus what we should be storing our source code! Down with journald! you should know the drill by now...) But interesting ideas are always interesting, so I'm willing to look into it, even if I don't like the look of it.
- mcbuilder 10y ago
  How does a visual programming environment prevent an ASCII text representation? Counter example: Data flow programming, or even SVG diagrams. I can't think of an exact analog, but I'd be willing to bet there is a textual VPL out there. Sure you need a tool to support conversion to a GUI, it's a different way to think!
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    It can, and I'd be fine with that. It's just that they don't, for the most part.
  - memracom 10y ago
    The ResolverOne spreadsheet was a normal spreadsheet program that wrote Python code under the hood. You could then add unit tests and validate your spreadsheet calculations. The company was sold but this web version https://github.com/pythonanywhere/dirigible-spreadsheet https://github.com/pythonanywhere/dirigible-spreadsheet remains and is open sourced. I also remember a project management tool that similarly wrote Python code under the hood. And then there is the Talend Data Integration toolkit which writes and compiles Java under the hood. There is a lot of this stuff kicking around these days if you care to hunt for it. However I think that workflow systems like Apache Taverna and jBPMN are more useful. You still write chunks of code but the framework glues it all together in a flexible manageable way instead of creating a Big Ball of Mud.
- GuiA 10y ago
  I don't understand your ideological point. The editable representation has no bearing whatsoever on the storage representation of a program. There is nothing preventing you from having a visual programming environment where everything is just ASCII text under the hood.
denfromufa 10y ago
Blockly developed by Google is adopted by many educational projects: https://developers.google.com/blockly/ https://developers.google.com/blockly/ Go to "Built with Blockly" which includes BBC MicroBit, MIT App Inventor, code.org, LEGO (3rd party), PBS, Minecraft (3rd party), etc.
- erichocean 10y ago
  Blocky…sucks. Way worse than just learning something like Python. (And this is someone who's spent most of his professional life working on visual programming systems.)
  - catscratch 10y ago
    It might suck, but it's what kids are learning, since Scratch uses it.
  - Buetol 10y ago
    I've found the Khan academy way to be very efficient for 9-years olds. The main problem with textual languages is that kids mess up with the syntax easily but once they "get it", it's a bliss.
  - denfromufa 10y ago
    Can you point to any specific issues? And what would you recommend instead?
buskila 10y ago
Is there something similar to mermaid or graphviz, a DSL of sorts, to generate similar diagrams?
memracom 10y ago
Couldn't get it to work on OSX (El Capitan) even after installing ActiveState Tcl/Tk. After removing that package following these instructions http://superuser.com/questions/36567/how-do-i-uninstall-any-apple-pkg-package-file http://superuser.com/questions/36567/how-do-i-uninstall-any-... I installed MacPorts from https://www.macports.org/ https://www.macports.org/ sudo port install tk cd ~/Downloads/drakon_editor1.27 tclsh8.6 drakon_editor.tcl And it works!!! Interesting idea for making the structure visible and presumably, helping find corner cases that are not handled. You could presumably build a library using Drakon, and then build an app using the library so that the detail of the code in the library is hidden behind simple function calls. This reminds me of the proliferation of graphical workflow systems such as BPMN and this nifty Data Mining app called Orange3 http://orange.biolab.si/orange3/ http://orange.biolab.si/orange3/ I think we may finally be figuring out how to apply a visual paradigm to coding in a way that works for real production apps.
jlebrech 10y ago
there should be a common interface to languages that have the same design patterns, why can't a class just be a visual representation of something that contains code, and do the same thing with methods and functions. then inside of visual blocks of code you can then keep the programming languages as simple as possible.
achr2 10y ago
Can the tool generate a diagram from existing source code? Obviously it would likely require additional input for internal 'headings'. And can the diagrams be automatically 'collapsed' into simpler flow charts? I have two thoughts around this: 1) A lot of 'simple' source code would generate large, complex diagrams - which are likely not very readable, and brings up the same old decries against visual programming. 2) maybe striving for code that works well when converted to a visual language is a good check for code quality.

278 points by GuiA 10y ago

Visual languages are also often used in industrial applications, usually in the form of ladder logic instead of flow diagrams.

smaili 10y ago

This is the first time in a while I've seen an active project on SourceForge.

hyperion2010 10y ago
https://github.com/stepan-mitkin/drakon_editor https://github.com/stepan-mitkin/drakon_editor seems to be where development is though.
reitanqild 10y ago
Nice, isn't it? (SF has new owners!)

ivan_ah 10y ago

This is very cool. I like this example which uses diagram for general logic flow, but mixes raw code for details: http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/folder-night.png http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/folder-night.png

hbt 10y ago

This is great work. FYI spacex uses LabView http://www.ni.com/labview/ http://www.ni.com/labview/ (amongst other stuff) I wonder if you could use annotations to manage the visuals e.g http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/folder-night.png http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/folder-night.png You'd have an inline annotation to separate the code blocks and generate the visuals so you don't have to maintain/update two places. Any tool that does that? Also, integrating different level of complexity using system 1,2,3 (from https://www.amazon.ca/Software-Requirements-3rd-Karl-Wiegers/dp/0735679665 https://www.amazon.ca/Software-Requirements-3rd-Karl-Wiegers...) to represent user flow diagram in addition to flow charts. Flow charts get confusing after some complexity. Useless if you want to represent multiple actors + messages. Systems/sub-systems view. There is a tendency to think of visual programming as an all or nothing. Either we have all text or all visual. As long as it is "Write once, update everywhere", visual tools can be useful in navigating new code bases, obtaining insights and quickly understanding a piece of code. The problem though is they often require maitenance and get out of date with reality (even if it is comments/annotations)

asciihacker 10y ago

I fought like hell to install all the deps before throwing in the towel.

Alupis 10y ago
> I fought like hell to install all the deps before throwing in the towel. What? The deps are pretty tame for such a large program. tcl8.6, tk8.6, tcllib, libsqlite3-tcl, libtk-img So, for a debian/ubuntu machine: sudo apt-get install tcl8.6 tk8.6 tcllib libsqlite3-tcl libtk-img RHEL/Fedora and friends will be similar, except with yum/dnf. All of this info is at the top of the downloads section: http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/editor.html#downloads http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/editor.html#downloads

asciihacker 10y ago

Also see PlantUML, which also has experimental code generation tech.

aaronheid 10y ago

Looks awesome, great tool to reduce complexity in all situations

ilaksh 10y ago

Is there some overlap between these types of tools and http://martinfowler.com/bliki/ProjectionalEditing.html http://martinfowler.com/bliki/ProjectionalEditing.html

eiffel31 10y ago
Drakon does not seem to be model-based, so I would say no. If you are interested in Projectional Editing, you should look at MPS or Eclipse's Sirius.
iamcreasy 10y ago
Can you explain in simpler terms what "Projectional Editing" is?

javajosh 10y ago

Pretty cool, but one nitpick: when you save as SVG it embeds the font as a base64 encoded url(). Neat trick, but it bloats the file a lot. A simple chart with a few elements ends up being 250kB. Hand-written SVG would be two orders-of-magnitude less than that.

kelvin0 10y ago

Humm, this looks and awful like flow charts? What am I missing (apart from the 'Insertion' of macro charts)? All the rules about not 'breaking' visual cohesiveness seem like a plus, although not groundbreaking either. Don't want to sound negative, maybe someone can correct me?

GuiA 10y ago
It is a formal specification for a specific kind of flow charts, yes. The specifics of the implementation, the history, and the tooling around it are what's interesting. Your comment is a bit analogous to someone commenting "Humm, this looks an awful lot like programming?" on a link documenting a forgotten programming language. Well yes, it's true, but it's a tautological statement.
- kelvin0 10y ago
  Ah, so this is interesting from a historic perspective. I thought this was being released as a formal method that brought some innovation, as mentionned earlier I had no idea or context other than the slide I went through posted in the link.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

aaawow 10y ago

The whole Buran spacecraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft) was designed using Drakon

hulahoof 10y ago

Can anyone explain the advantage of a specification like this over something like UML?

dragonwriter 10y ago
Compared to UML Activity Diagrams, DRAKON-Foo (where Foo can be Python, C, C++, Erlang, or any of a bunch of others): (1) Is constrained in a way designed to enhance understanding of the visual flow, and (2) Directly includes code (in language Foo) in the boxes, rather than text; that is, its a programming environment, not a diagramming language with text that gets converted to program code somewhere else that is maintained separately. The first item is also a feature of DRAKON by itself.
- eiffel31 10y ago
  About (2): there is a standard action language for UML which can be used to fully describe your algorithm, independently of any language. In that sense, the DRAKON approach seems more practical for software engineers / programmers while the UML approach seems better for the domain experts.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

I'm really confused as to what exactly this is, but it looks cool. It seems to be some kind of visual programming environment, which I'm usually against on principle (BOO non-standard binary formats! ASCII text is the closest we can get to future-proof, and thus what we should be storing our source code! Down with journald! you should know the drill by now...) But interesting ideas are always interesting, so I'm willing to look into it, even if I don't like the look of it.

mcbuilder 10y ago
How does a visual programming environment prevent an ASCII text representation? Counter example: Data flow programming, or even SVG diagrams. I can't think of an exact analog, but I'd be willing to bet there is a textual VPL out there. Sure you need a tool to support conversion to a GUI, it's a different way to think!
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  It can, and I'd be fine with that. It's just that they don't, for the most part.
- memracom 10y ago
  The ResolverOne spreadsheet was a normal spreadsheet program that wrote Python code under the hood. You could then add unit tests and validate your spreadsheet calculations. The company was sold but this web version https://github.com/pythonanywhere/dirigible-spreadsheet https://github.com/pythonanywhere/dirigible-spreadsheet remains and is open sourced. I also remember a project management tool that similarly wrote Python code under the hood. And then there is the Talend Data Integration toolkit which writes and compiles Java under the hood. There is a lot of this stuff kicking around these days if you care to hunt for it. However I think that workflow systems like Apache Taverna and jBPMN are more useful. You still write chunks of code but the framework glues it all together in a flexible manageable way instead of creating a Big Ball of Mud.
GuiA 10y ago
I don't understand your ideological point. The editable representation has no bearing whatsoever on the storage representation of a program. There is nothing preventing you from having a visual programming environment where everything is just ASCII text under the hood.

denfromufa 10y ago

Blockly developed by Google is adopted by many educational projects: https://developers.google.com/blockly/ https://developers.google.com/blockly/ Go to "Built with Blockly" which includes BBC MicroBit, MIT App Inventor, code.org, LEGO (3rd party), PBS, Minecraft (3rd party), etc.

erichocean 10y ago
Blocky…sucks. Way worse than just learning something like Python. (And this is someone who's spent most of his professional life working on visual programming systems.)
- catscratch 10y ago
  It might suck, but it's what kids are learning, since Scratch uses it.
- Buetol 10y ago
  I've found the Khan academy way to be very efficient for 9-years olds. The main problem with textual languages is that kids mess up with the syntax easily but once they "get it", it's a bliss.
- denfromufa 10y ago
  Can you point to any specific issues? And what would you recommend instead?

buskila 10y ago

Is there something similar to mermaid or graphviz, a DSL of sorts, to generate similar diagrams?

memracom 10y ago

Couldn't get it to work on OSX (El Capitan) even after installing ActiveState Tcl/Tk. After removing that package following these instructions http://superuser.com/questions/36567/how-do-i-uninstall-any-apple-pkg-package-file http://superuser.com/questions/36567/how-do-i-uninstall-any-... I installed MacPorts from https://www.macports.org/ https://www.macports.org/ sudo port install tk cd ~/Downloads/drakon_editor1.27 tclsh8.6 drakon_editor.tcl And it works!!! Interesting idea for making the structure visible and presumably, helping find corner cases that are not handled. You could presumably build a library using Drakon, and then build an app using the library so that the detail of the code in the library is hidden behind simple function calls. This reminds me of the proliferation of graphical workflow systems such as BPMN and this nifty Data Mining app called Orange3 http://orange.biolab.si/orange3/ http://orange.biolab.si/orange3/ I think we may finally be figuring out how to apply a visual paradigm to coding in a way that works for real production apps.

jlebrech 10y ago

there should be a common interface to languages that have the same design patterns, why can't a class just be a visual representation of something that contains code, and do the same thing with methods and functions. then inside of visual blocks of code you can then keep the programming languages as simple as possible.

achr2 10y ago

Can the tool generate a diagram from existing source code? Obviously it would likely require additional input for internal 'headings'. And can the diagrams be automatically 'collapsed' into simpler flow charts? I have two thoughts around this: 1) A lot of 'simple' source code would generate large, complex diagrams - which are likely not very readable, and brings up the same old decries against visual programming. 2) maybe striving for code that works well when converted to a visual language is a good check for code quality.