7 ms·

Full Metal Jacket: A visual dataflow language (2016)

56 points by mr_tyzic 8y ago

Hyperborian 8y ago
I'm just a few pages in to the tutorial and I already want to try it out myself... but how? Where's the link? Is this not available to the public yet?
- analognoise 8y ago
  Iirc it has never been publically available.
- scottlocklin 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure Labview has a free version and works better.
hliyan 8y ago
"Text-based languages are so 20th century" This is arguably NOT true. Visual languages have consistently failed to match, let alone out-do textual languages for decades, and with good reason.
- _wmd 8y ago
  Would you consider Microsoft Excel a visual language?
  - the_duke 8y ago
    Excel is an interesting case. I think it sits between both worlds. The interface and main interaction is visual, yet the actual logic is textual. This seems to hit the sweet spot, making it useful for the non-programmer yet providing significant depth and complexity. Note that personally I hate using plain Excel because the formulas seem so restrictive and the functions I want are never there, but again this seems to be ideal for the target audience.
  - hliyan 8y ago
    Excel is cartesian, which is hardly 'graphical'. There are virtually no superfluous graphical detail (e.g. placement of shapes, arrows, thickness etc.) -- the only part of the flexgrid that has semantic meaning is the row and column reference.
    - TuringTest 8y ago
      Giving meaning to coordinates in a 2D chart makes it a graphical language. It certainly is different from conventional languages, which use a tree metaphor (nested expressions) and a linear syntax (everything is considered a long stream of text to be parsed). Using rows and columns instead of code blocks helps a great deal in reducing the cognitive load of having to address every part of the language through an ID, either for variables of functions. Not to mention intermixing code and data values, which is not considered part of conventional languages (though is common in interactive debugging sessions, which are typically considered "visual" debugging).
  - 6nf 8y ago
    I'm going to say 'yes'. It's a good question and I think Excel qualifies even though in normal use Excel shows the data but not really the logic / formulas etc.
    - _wmd 8y ago
      Excel succeeds at its job so thoroughly that I think people fail to realize (or cope with the realization) that spreadsheets are probably the most successful democratized programming environment we have. It may not have been intentional, but the 2D grid representation for data interlaced with an acyclic dependency graph is by far superior to any alternative representation, visual or otherwise, I can think of for either of those concepts. Users don't even think about graphs or data, often they don't even understand those terms. Due to this IMHO spreadsheets are pretty much peak computer science
- TuringTest 8y ago
  Visual languages fare very well for the use cases where they're adequate, and with good reason: dataflow specifications, data mungling, circuit design, and end-user development. The error is thinking that "visual languages" are adequate for the same general purpose as textual languages. But for certain Domain Specific Languages, visual tools can be and have shown themselves to be quite useful.
- vectorEQ 8y ago
  visual languages are good for very specific domains. look at Reaktor from native instruments, thats something which does work a lot better visually as a lot of the people who need that functionality aren't programmers neccesarily, and programming dsp units is not an easy task. you have applications for visual programming, but often it's very very specific or just purely for educational purposes. (teaching logic can be handy to do visually for some audiences.)
drivingmenuts 8y ago
My first thought was “it’s Visual Lisp”. My second was that it reminded me of an old music tracker program called Buzz Tracker. It was a bitch to learn, but once you got a few concepts down, it was insanely powerful. It was also pretty unstable.
- bane 8y ago
  Sadly, the source to Buzz was lost and development stopped. A hacker community kept it going for quite a while. It's apparently been restarted. http://jeskola.net/buzz/ http://jeskola.net/buzz/
  - drivingmenuts 8y ago
    The main thing I remember about Buzz was that every time there was an update, all the sound generators changed. If you were relying on producing a certain sound for a certain song, you didn't dare d/l any updates. Also, apparently the generators and effects left off some limiters when they were trying to emulate certain synths. You could easily produce something the original machine wasn't intended to. Personally, since I didn't know much about hardware synths, I didn't notice. A much more knowledgable roommate informed me and I just took his word for it. That was fun program to work with though.
rdtsc 8y ago
I have seen visual dataflow languages and even worked on some of them. They usually work better in specific domains like stream processing, control systems, signal processing and such. Even then, once a "program" gets complex it can get tangled fast. A node with 3000 edges starts to look messy. There are some things you can do to fix it but then you just kind of wish to use a simple script. As for general computing, the most thought out language I've seen so far is probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON. Apparently you can now even try it online: https://drakonhub.com/try-me?example=mind157 https://drakonhub.com/try-me?example=mind157 I like Full Metal Jacket in that it starts with a functional approach (it seems to be based on LISP) and might actually be a good way to introduce functional programming to newcomers. For example, here you just have a "factorial" node when you define the factorial function: http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/fmj/tutorials/Recursion.html http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/fmj/tutorials/Recursion.html Some people really struggle with recursion initially and if they are visual learners this might be helpful.
- userbinator 8y ago
  You may find this interesting: someone using DRAKON to model and simulate the 6502 CPU at the transistor level. He is, not surprisingly, Russian: http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=2208 http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=2208 (Russian) video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43zPp01i6So https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43zPp01i6So
  - rdtsc 8y ago
    Thank you, that was neat. I speak Russian and it was fascinating to watch someone build software in DRAKON.
- RantyDave 8y ago
  Visual effects lives breathes and eats visual languages. It's not necessarily a good thing - people get (very) competent with them then start writing C++ using the same style namely, copy-n-paste a go go. Refactoring fun for all the family.
xvilka 8y ago
Something like Luna[1] language looks saner - where it has both textual and visual representation. [1] https://luna-lang.org/ https://luna-lang.org/
ivanhoe 8y ago
Considering that I spend at least 30% of my work time in the command line I really have some doubts about these "text is obsolete" ideas.
- drpixie 8y ago
  Agree - looks largely like syntactic sugar. Fine if that what's you want but should be acknowledged as such.
- ken 8y ago
  I spend at least 30% of my time in the command line, but at least 90% of that time using it to parse complex formats before I can do what I really want to do with my data -- or fake it (e.g., plain grep on structured data, because properly parsing it is not well supported by any tools yet). That doesn't tell me text is dead. It tells me text is the best we've got so far, and we're desperate for something better. When a C=64 was the only computer I had, I spent most of my time writing assembly language. That wasn't evidence that assembly language was the way to go. I just had insufficient perspective, from having to use insufficient tools.
caymanjim 8y ago
The name of this language is stupid. It evokes violence, either via the bullet reference, or via the film of the same name. I'm not thin-skinned or even prone to political correctness, but I still find it slightly insensitive for no compelling reason. Then I read the author's explanation (http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/fmj/Name.html http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/fmj/Name.html), which makes a comparison between lisp (the programming language) and stereotypes about homosexuality (with the requisite "I have gay friends!" disclaimer). Maybe the author should grow up.
- ravenstine 8y ago
  > I'm not thin-skinned Are you sure about that? The gay thing is weird, yeah, but you basically are thin skinned if the connection between bullets and violence is that bothersome to you. Most people aren't that bothered by references to violence; if they were then violent shows and movies wouldn't be the best-sellers they currently are. What if I wrote a useful library and called it "Bomb"? Would that be insensitive of me?
  - caymanjim 8y ago
    I wouldn't have said anything about that if not for the gay bit. I thought about just deleting that part, but I'll let it stand.
  - gavinpc 8y ago
    At least "Bomb" would be short. "Full Metal Jacket" is a dreadful name in every sense, worsened only by the author's cringeworthy backstory. To paraphrase the parent, it reeks of immaturity. I "wouldn't hold that against" the tool if it had technical merit.
- camtarn 8y ago
  Yeah, I find the name very off-putting. It just doesn't sound professional, and I can't picture myself explaining to a client that I would be providing them with Full Metal Jacket source files. In particular, in the UK, I suspect the terminology for bullets is almost unknown, so it would be seen exclusively as a film reference. Call it FMJ and it would be fine, though!
Eli_P 8y ago
Visual representation for code has its own niches for certain. The most newfangled thingy I've encountered is Ballerina[1], it's kind of text <-> diagram convertible code, cloud-oriented. Looks cool; there are some codes on github[2]. But anyways, I think it may be worthy as a domain-specific environment only. Because as a general-purpose language, visual languages are claimed to have improved perceptible difficulty, but in general case, they don't. Try to define perceptible difficulty, or search for implementations in code linters, I believe it's always subjective, like max lines of code per function. The true code representation is multidimensional and incomprehensible for a monkey brain, even if you'd made it look like a multi-layer Manhattan-like glowing graph. [1] https://ballerina.io/philosophy/ https://ballerina.io/philosophy/ [2] https://github.com/search?q=ballerina https://github.com/search?q=ballerina
- asn0 8y ago
  I'm curious how Ballerina avoids (or does it?) this problem mentioned in another comment: >once a "program" gets complex it can get tangled fast. A node with 3000 edges starts to look messy.
  - TuringTest 8y ago
    That wouldn't be messier than a textual function making 3000 function calls, or accepting 3000 parameters. The way you handle this complexity should be the same in both cases: creating abstractions that bundle together related items, hiding the details on a lower layer and exposing only the general ideas at the outer level. Unfortunately, visual languages tend to be quite poor at abstraction. We've been developing and improving ways to make better abstractions in textual languages for the last 50 years, but somehow visual languages seem to be using the same abstraction tools we had with ALGOL, when not the same ones we had with Assembler. For a mental framework on how to analyze and design visual languages for usability, see Cognitive Dimensions of Notations.[1][2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dimensions_of_notations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dimensions_of_notati... [2] https://www.uxbooth.com/articles/a-usable-guide-to-cognitive-dimensions/ https://www.uxbooth.com/articles/a-usable-guide-to-cognitive...
hjek 8y ago
Looks a lot like Pd[0]. [0]: https://puredata.info/ https://puredata.info/
lincpa 8y ago
The Clojure threading macro provides language-level support for The Pure Function Pipeline Data Flow https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow
sidcool 8y ago
This is pretty cool. I am looking for a tool that can help with visualization of Linear Programming/Optimization problems. How constraints interact etc. Would be pretty cool.
merricksb 8y ago
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12106259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12106259
deadmanku 8y ago
when you look at code it's hard to recognize. if there is a way to success of a visual programming language that is the code should appeal more recognizable than text.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
theshadowknows 8y ago
Funny how so much of the underlying code used to make this “keyboardless” language was written on a keyboard. I’ll be more impressed when there’s a “FMJ” implementation written purely in “FMJ.”
6nf 8y ago
Hmmm I'm trying to picture what a debugging session with something like this might look like... I can't decide if it would be amazing or impossible
vectorEQ 8y ago
i dont see how this is different from regular programming to be honest. perhaps that you dont have side effects as a possibility, but i just see someone making functions and tying them together and supplying inputs and outputs? :/ seems super tedious to have to use the mouse, like with most things programming related, a keyboard is generally much easier to use.
IshKebab 8y ago
Looks like Labview. Nobody who has used Labview would try to recreate it. One of the main problems I find with these type of systems, is that although you can add comments and maybe even organise your diagrams nicely, it is such a pain to do that nobody does. You always end up with literal spaghetti code with zero comments.
ken 8y ago
There's one thing here I strongly agree with: > There is no point developing new programming languages unless they're radically different from existing languages. 95% of the time, any language from the past few decades would work fine for what I'm doing, and I run into far more problems from languages changing than from languages lacking features. (Python 3 is the poster child for this right now, but I don't think it's even the worst offender.) One of my favorite languages is Common Lisp, and that hasn't changed since the 1980's. There's also something here I strongly disagree with: > Programs are composed almost entirely with the mouse rather than keyboard, and type inference and other checks take place while you edit your program. If there's one thing that's true of all programmers today, on any platform, it's that they love their keyboards. You'll never get anywhere trying to get them to edit a program with just their mouse. Graphical programming languages are cool, but they need to incorporate keyboard editing. Like any IDE, you should be able to work with a mouse, but not required to. Put "graphical representation" and "mouse-only editing" in the same boat and the latter will sink the former. I've known a couple programmers who hooked up foot pedals to their editors. I know nobody who's ever written programs with just a mouse. So based on my experience, you're going to have a tougher time selling anyone on this than if you'd made a programming language which required you to use your feet.
- nikofeyn 8y ago
  regarding the mouse and keyboard use in visual programming, i have used labview extensively. with labview, one normally assumes one hand on the mouse and another on the left side of the keyboard, which is used in a chorded manner in that it provides modifications to what the mouse is doing. this is common i think to other visual environments such CAD programs. then the hands join back on the keyboard for searching and quick drop. i think a hybrid setup like this can be powerful. it is under researched though. i am learning emacs at the moment, which is in the pure keyboard camp. while seemingly powerful, it does feel like a blast into the past and not so efficient in terms of learning curve or reasoning. so all keyboard and all mouse are a miss. i personally think a mix of keyboard, mouse, and touch is something to be explored.

56 points by mr_tyzic 8y ago

I'm just a few pages in to the tutorial and I already want to try it out myself... but how? Where's the link? Is this not available to the public yet?

analognoise 8y ago
Iirc it has never been publically available.
scottlocklin 8y ago
I'm pretty sure Labview has a free version and works better.

hliyan 8y ago

"Text-based languages are so 20th century" This is arguably NOT true. Visual languages have consistently failed to match, let alone out-do textual languages for decades, and with good reason.

_wmd 8y ago
Would you consider Microsoft Excel a visual language?
- the_duke 8y ago
  Excel is an interesting case. I think it sits between both worlds. The interface and main interaction is visual, yet the actual logic is textual. This seems to hit the sweet spot, making it useful for the non-programmer yet providing significant depth and complexity. Note that personally I hate using plain Excel because the formulas seem so restrictive and the functions I want are never there, but again this seems to be ideal for the target audience.
- hliyan 8y ago
  Excel is cartesian, which is hardly 'graphical'. There are virtually no superfluous graphical detail (e.g. placement of shapes, arrows, thickness etc.) -- the only part of the flexgrid that has semantic meaning is the row and column reference.
  - TuringTest 8y ago
    Giving meaning to coordinates in a 2D chart makes it a graphical language. It certainly is different from conventional languages, which use a tree metaphor (nested expressions) and a linear syntax (everything is considered a long stream of text to be parsed). Using rows and columns instead of code blocks helps a great deal in reducing the cognitive load of having to address every part of the language through an ID, either for variables of functions. Not to mention intermixing code and data values, which is not considered part of conventional languages (though is common in interactive debugging sessions, which are typically considered "visual" debugging).
- 6nf 8y ago
  I'm going to say 'yes'. It's a good question and I think Excel qualifies even though in normal use Excel shows the data but not really the logic / formulas etc.
  - _wmd 8y ago
    Excel succeeds at its job so thoroughly that I think people fail to realize (or cope with the realization) that spreadsheets are probably the most successful democratized programming environment we have. It may not have been intentional, but the 2D grid representation for data interlaced with an acyclic dependency graph is by far superior to any alternative representation, visual or otherwise, I can think of for either of those concepts. Users don't even think about graphs or data, often they don't even understand those terms. Due to this IMHO spreadsheets are pretty much peak computer science
TuringTest 8y ago
Visual languages fare very well for the use cases where they're adequate, and with good reason: dataflow specifications, data mungling, circuit design, and end-user development. The error is thinking that "visual languages" are adequate for the same general purpose as textual languages. But for certain Domain Specific Languages, visual tools can be and have shown themselves to be quite useful.
vectorEQ 8y ago
visual languages are good for very specific domains. look at Reaktor from native instruments, thats something which does work a lot better visually as a lot of the people who need that functionality aren't programmers neccesarily, and programming dsp units is not an easy task. you have applications for visual programming, but often it's very very specific or just purely for educational purposes. (teaching logic can be handy to do visually for some audiences.)

drivingmenuts 8y ago

My first thought was “it’s Visual Lisp”. My second was that it reminded me of an old music tracker program called Buzz Tracker. It was a bitch to learn, but once you got a few concepts down, it was insanely powerful. It was also pretty unstable.

bane 8y ago
Sadly, the source to Buzz was lost and development stopped. A hacker community kept it going for quite a while. It's apparently been restarted. http://jeskola.net/buzz/ http://jeskola.net/buzz/
- drivingmenuts 8y ago
  The main thing I remember about Buzz was that every time there was an update, all the sound generators changed. If you were relying on producing a certain sound for a certain song, you didn't dare d/l any updates. Also, apparently the generators and effects left off some limiters when they were trying to emulate certain synths. You could easily produce something the original machine wasn't intended to. Personally, since I didn't know much about hardware synths, I didn't notice. A much more knowledgable roommate informed me and I just took his word for it. That was fun program to work with though.

rdtsc 8y ago

I have seen visual dataflow languages and even worked on some of them. They usually work better in specific domains like stream processing, control systems, signal processing and such. Even then, once a "program" gets complex it can get tangled fast. A node with 3000 edges starts to look messy. There are some things you can do to fix it but then you just kind of wish to use a simple script. As for general computing, the most thought out language I've seen so far is probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON. Apparently you can now even try it online: https://drakonhub.com/try-me?example=mind157 https://drakonhub.com/try-me?example=mind157 I like Full Metal Jacket in that it starts with a functional approach (it seems to be based on LISP) and might actually be a good way to introduce functional programming to newcomers. For example, here you just have a "factorial" node when you define the factorial function: http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/fmj/tutorials/Recursion.html http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/fmj/tutorials/Recursion.html Some people really struggle with recursion initially and if they are visual learners this might be helpful.

userbinator 8y ago
You may find this interesting: someone using DRAKON to model and simulate the 6502 CPU at the transistor level. He is, not surprisingly, Russian: http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=2208 http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=2208 (Russian) video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43zPp01i6So https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43zPp01i6So
- rdtsc 8y ago
  Thank you, that was neat. I speak Russian and it was fascinating to watch someone build software in DRAKON.
RantyDave 8y ago
Visual effects lives breathes and eats visual languages. It's not necessarily a good thing - people get (very) competent with them then start writing C++ using the same style namely, copy-n-paste a go go. Refactoring fun for all the family.

xvilka 8y ago

Something like Luna[1] language looks saner - where it has both textual and visual representation. [1] https://luna-lang.org/ https://luna-lang.org/

ivanhoe 8y ago

Considering that I spend at least 30% of my work time in the command line I really have some doubts about these "text is obsolete" ideas.

drpixie 8y ago
Agree - looks largely like syntactic sugar. Fine if that what's you want but should be acknowledged as such.
ken 8y ago
I spend at least 30% of my time in the command line, but at least 90% of that time using it to parse complex formats before I can do what I really want to do with my data -- or fake it (e.g., plain grep on structured data, because properly parsing it is not well supported by any tools yet). That doesn't tell me text is dead. It tells me text is the best we've got so far, and we're desperate for something better. When a C=64 was the only computer I had, I spent most of my time writing assembly language. That wasn't evidence that assembly language was the way to go. I just had insufficient perspective, from having to use insufficient tools.

caymanjim 8y ago

The name of this language is stupid. It evokes violence, either via the bullet reference, or via the film of the same name. I'm not thin-skinned or even prone to political correctness, but I still find it slightly insensitive for no compelling reason. Then I read the author's explanation (http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/fmj/Name.html http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/fmj/Name.html), which makes a comparison between lisp (the programming language) and stereotypes about homosexuality (with the requisite "I have gay friends!" disclaimer). Maybe the author should grow up.

ravenstine 8y ago
> I'm not thin-skinned Are you sure about that? The gay thing is weird, yeah, but you basically are thin skinned if the connection between bullets and violence is that bothersome to you. Most people aren't that bothered by references to violence; if they were then violent shows and movies wouldn't be the best-sellers they currently are. What if I wrote a useful library and called it "Bomb"? Would that be insensitive of me?
- caymanjim 8y ago
  I wouldn't have said anything about that if not for the gay bit. I thought about just deleting that part, but I'll let it stand.
- gavinpc 8y ago
  At least "Bomb" would be short. "Full Metal Jacket" is a dreadful name in every sense, worsened only by the author's cringeworthy backstory. To paraphrase the parent, it reeks of immaturity. I "wouldn't hold that against" the tool if it had technical merit.
camtarn 8y ago
Yeah, I find the name very off-putting. It just doesn't sound professional, and I can't picture myself explaining to a client that I would be providing them with Full Metal Jacket source files. In particular, in the UK, I suspect the terminology for bullets is almost unknown, so it would be seen exclusively as a film reference. Call it FMJ and it would be fine, though!

Eli_P 8y ago

Visual representation for code has its own niches for certain. The most newfangled thingy I've encountered is Ballerina[1], it's kind of text <-> diagram convertible code, cloud-oriented. Looks cool; there are some codes on github[2]. But anyways, I think it may be worthy as a domain-specific environment only. Because as a general-purpose language, visual languages are claimed to have improved perceptible difficulty, but in general case, they don't. Try to define perceptible difficulty, or search for implementations in code linters, I believe it's always subjective, like max lines of code per function. The true code representation is multidimensional and incomprehensible for a monkey brain, even if you'd made it look like a multi-layer Manhattan-like glowing graph. [1] https://ballerina.io/philosophy/ https://ballerina.io/philosophy/ [2] https://github.com/search?q=ballerina https://github.com/search?q=ballerina

asn0 8y ago
I'm curious how Ballerina avoids (or does it?) this problem mentioned in another comment: >once a "program" gets complex it can get tangled fast. A node with 3000 edges starts to look messy.
- TuringTest 8y ago
  That wouldn't be messier than a textual function making 3000 function calls, or accepting 3000 parameters. The way you handle this complexity should be the same in both cases: creating abstractions that bundle together related items, hiding the details on a lower layer and exposing only the general ideas at the outer level. Unfortunately, visual languages tend to be quite poor at abstraction. We've been developing and improving ways to make better abstractions in textual languages for the last 50 years, but somehow visual languages seem to be using the same abstraction tools we had with ALGOL, when not the same ones we had with Assembler. For a mental framework on how to analyze and design visual languages for usability, see Cognitive Dimensions of Notations.[1][2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dimensions_of_notations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dimensions_of_notati... [2] https://www.uxbooth.com/articles/a-usable-guide-to-cognitive-dimensions/ https://www.uxbooth.com/articles/a-usable-guide-to-cognitive...

hjek 8y ago

Looks a lot like Pd[0]. [0]: https://puredata.info/ https://puredata.info/

lincpa 8y ago

The Clojure threading macro provides language-level support for The Pure Function Pipeline Data Flow https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow

sidcool 8y ago

This is pretty cool. I am looking for a tool that can help with visualization of Linear Programming/Optimization problems. How constraints interact etc. Would be pretty cool.

merricksb 8y ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12106259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12106259

deadmanku 8y ago

when you look at code it's hard to recognize. if there is a way to success of a visual programming language that is the code should appeal more recognizable than text.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

theshadowknows 8y ago

Funny how so much of the underlying code used to make this “keyboardless” language was written on a keyboard. I’ll be more impressed when there’s a “FMJ” implementation written purely in “FMJ.”

6nf 8y ago

Hmmm I'm trying to picture what a debugging session with something like this might look like... I can't decide if it would be amazing or impossible

vectorEQ 8y ago

i dont see how this is different from regular programming to be honest. perhaps that you dont have side effects as a possibility, but i just see someone making functions and tying them together and supplying inputs and outputs? :/ seems super tedious to have to use the mouse, like with most things programming related, a keyboard is generally much easier to use.

IshKebab 8y ago

Looks like Labview. Nobody who has used Labview would try to recreate it. One of the main problems I find with these type of systems, is that although you can add comments and maybe even organise your diagrams nicely, it is such a pain to do that nobody does. You always end up with literal spaghetti code with zero comments.

ken 8y ago

There's one thing here I strongly agree with: > There is no point developing new programming languages unless they're radically different from existing languages. 95% of the time, any language from the past few decades would work fine for what I'm doing, and I run into far more problems from languages changing than from languages lacking features. (Python 3 is the poster child for this right now, but I don't think it's even the worst offender.) One of my favorite languages is Common Lisp, and that hasn't changed since the 1980's. There's also something here I strongly disagree with: > Programs are composed almost entirely with the mouse rather than keyboard, and type inference and other checks take place while you edit your program. If there's one thing that's true of all programmers today, on any platform, it's that they love their keyboards. You'll never get anywhere trying to get them to edit a program with just their mouse. Graphical programming languages are cool, but they need to incorporate keyboard editing. Like any IDE, you should be able to work with a mouse, but not required to. Put "graphical representation" and "mouse-only editing" in the same boat and the latter will sink the former. I've known a couple programmers who hooked up foot pedals to their editors. I know nobody who's ever written programs with just a mouse. So based on my experience, you're going to have a tougher time selling anyone on this than if you'd made a programming language which required you to use your feet.

nikofeyn 8y ago
regarding the mouse and keyboard use in visual programming, i have used labview extensively. with labview, one normally assumes one hand on the mouse and another on the left side of the keyboard, which is used in a chorded manner in that it provides modifications to what the mouse is doing. this is common i think to other visual environments such CAD programs. then the hands join back on the keyboard for searching and quick drop. i think a hybrid setup like this can be powerful. it is under researched though. i am learning emacs at the moment, which is in the pure keyboard camp. while seemingly powerful, it does feel like a blast into the past and not so efficient in terms of learning curve or reasoning. so all keyboard and all mouse are a miss. i personally think a mix of keyboard, mouse, and touch is something to be explored.