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> Even then, once a "program" gets complex it can get tangled fast. In my experience with both visual and textual languages, the same happens in textual langua

> Even then, once a "program" gets complex it can get tangled fast. In my experience with both visual and textual languages, the same happens in textual languages too, except we’re trained to use software engineering principles to attempt to manage the complexity (to varying levels of success). In my (somewhat limited) experience with visual languages, if you apply those same principles (especially some of the OO ones like encapsulation) and factor things into their own functions/nodes, it’s manageable too. Whether better or worse than textual probably depends on the use case and persons comfort level with either type of language and in practice most visual code I’ve seen was not written by a programmer and therefore the author did not know the software engineering principles that would have helped keep their code manageable.

rdtsc 8y ago
> except we’re trained to use software engineering principles to attempt to manage the complexity Yeah good point. I think visual languages are often used by people who haven't had experience with software engineering, and that's fine, it's one of their main selling points. But think there is a general limitation when abstracting connection between nodes. In a programming languages, one could for example do a loop and connect an array of a thousand structs to point to some pointer. In a visual language it would be drawing thousands of connections/wires by hand between nodes. So visual languages in a way hit an abstraction ceiling if you will. In some domains it doesn't matter and there are a few trick around it, so there is room for such languages, but I am pessimistic about a general approach.
- dkersten 8y ago
  In my (again, limited) experience with visual languages, you don’t need thousands of connections. There’s nothing technically preventing a visual language from having complex data types flow through connections and I know some visual languages can unpack arrays (that is, the node outputs a value for every element in an array) so you can have a similar loop. (I’ve seen the reverse too: packing lots of individual items into an array). If I were to design a visual language, I’d have nodes to access keys in KV tables, iterate through lists/arrays/trees and everything else I take for granted in textual languages. If a language doesn’t support that, then it’s probably because it was deemed unnecessary for the target users, not because of an inherent shortcoming in visual languages. But I’ve only used a small number of visual languages (Max/msp and Synthmaker being the two I’ve used most), so maybe you do see crazy numbers of connections in the wild (but again, I feel this could be avoided if the language designers wanted to)

rdtsc 8y ago

> except we’re trained to use software engineering principles to attempt to manage the complexity Yeah good point. I think visual languages are often used by people who haven't had experience with software engineering, and that's fine, it's one of their main selling points. But think there is a general limitation when abstracting connection between nodes. In a programming languages, one could for example do a loop and connect an array of a thousand structs to point to some pointer. In a visual language it would be drawing thousands of connections/wires by hand between nodes. So visual languages in a way hit an abstraction ceiling if you will. In some domains it doesn't matter and there are a few trick around it, so there is room for such languages, but I am pessimistic about a general approach.

dkersten 8y ago
In my (again, limited) experience with visual languages, you don’t need thousands of connections. There’s nothing technically preventing a visual language from having complex data types flow through connections and I know some visual languages can unpack arrays (that is, the node outputs a value for every element in an array) so you can have a similar loop. (I’ve seen the reverse too: packing lots of individual items into an array). If I were to design a visual language, I’d have nodes to access keys in KV tables, iterate through lists/arrays/trees and everything else I take for granted in textual languages. If a language doesn’t support that, then it’s probably because it was deemed unnecessary for the target users, not because of an inherent shortcoming in visual languages. But I’ve only used a small number of visual languages (Max/msp and Synthmaker being the two I’ve used most), so maybe you do see crazy numbers of connections in the wild (but again, I feel this could be avoided if the language designers wanted to)