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> There's nothing about visual programs that say "no version control" Well, this is one of those "in theory" things. In practice diffing and merging visual pro
by TorKlingberg 9y ago
> There's nothing about visual programs that say "no version control"
Well, this is one of those "in theory" things. In practice diffing and merging visual programs never works well, if at all. Usually nobody has developed the tools for a particular binary format.
Visual programming also has a lot of non-functional information like the exact placement of items. Textual code has indentation and such too, but not as much. To keep visual code clean you need to move it around often, but how to you merge that with other changes?
- icebraining 9y agoThat's true, but I wonder if that's not a result of having too few of them, which makes it harder to abstract basic components that can work for many languages, like letters and lines in text. Imagine saving the visual programs as SVG images of boxes and lines, with properties attached. Then you could easily make a generic merging tool that worked on those objects. It would sometimes make senseless combinations, but so do text version control utilities. Likewise, merging a move would be implementable, even if the result might have to be tweaked manually. But then again, git and hg have merge conflicts too.